Se o leão conhecesse a sua própria força, seria difícil dominá-lo.
Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushroomsin the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell's household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hi...
Reculer pour mieux sauter.
Possibly it’s something women do: spend time imagining what it’s like to be each other.One can learn from that, he thinks.
One of the French lords says, To lose gracefully is an art that every gentleman cultivates. I hope to cultivate it too, he says. If you see an example I might follow, please point it out.
One never anticipated the scale of it, Brissot whispered. It was planned, yes, and people were paid—but not ten thousand people. Not even the Duke could pay ten thousand people. They acted for themsel...
Now here is Gardiner, patting a manuscript as if it were the cheek of a plump baby: ‘The king will be pleased to read this. I have called it, Of True Obedience.’ ‘You had better let me see it before i...
Nobody knows how long the arrests wil go on and who else will be taken. He feels even he does not know, and he is in charge of it.
Men will tell you that they are so in love with you that it is making them ill. They will say they have stopped eating and sleeping. They say that they fear unless they can have you they will die. The...
In the end, Dr Bhattacharya had said, the heart fails without warning.
I wonder, he says, how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king’s pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded. At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled.
I am no one’s agent. I am the agent of the law. All the conspiracies pass through my hands. The Committee, you know, draws its present unity from being conspired against. I do not know what would happ...
He tries not to give offense. He likes to think of himself by nature as reasonable and conciliatory. He can duck out, prevaricate, evade the issue. He can smile enigmatically and refuse to come down o...
He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.
He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had...
He never sees More – a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod – without wanting to ask him, what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and e...
He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn't say which people, but waits...
For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them. You make other men think, not what does he look like? but what do...
Cromwell, suppose you’d been away from England for seven years? If you’d been like a knight in a story, lying under an enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are they, these people?
But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?