Life is not like detective stories. There is a wider scope for interpretation. The answers to all the questions that beset you are not in facts, which are the greatest illusion of all, but in your own...
Let me unfold to you, he says, the way my thoughts proceed.
Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he th...
Inside his copy of The Social Contract he keeps a letter from a young Picard, an enthusiast called Antoine Saint-Just: I know you, Robespierre, as I know God, by your works.When he suffers, as he does...
In the end, Dr Bhattacharya had said, the heart fails without warning.
I resent you— Robespierre said. His words were lost. The People, he shouted, are everywhere good, and if they obstruct the Revolution—even, for example, at Toulon—we must blame their leaders.What are...
I know that, if I took your oath, I should be damned. There are those who would envy your insight, he says, into the workings of grace. But then, you and God have always been on familiar terms, not so...
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 would have explained, if he’d known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, I found an easier...
He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.
He thinks, strive as I might, one day I will be gone and as this world goes it may not be long: what though I am a man of firmness and vigour, fortune is mutable and either my enemies will do for me o...
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...
He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?' 'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.' He gives his son a long look. '...
But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?
But the nation’s business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lo...
An elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant.
I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on who went before?
Crenellations, the scarlet and the pale, the airy stone and the
One fear creates a dereliction, the offense brings on a greater fear, and there comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionl...
Once they were young men of esprit, young men of élan. A quarter of a century has passed and they are grey or balding, flabby or paunchy, gone in the fetlock or missing some fingers, but still as arro...