But Parliament cannot see how it is the state's job to create work. Are not these matters in God's hands, and is not poverty and dereliction part of his eternal order? To everything there is a season:...
At the top of the Queen’s Staircase at the Tuileries, there is a series of communicating chambers, crowded every day with clerks, secretaries, messengers, with army officers and purveyors, officials o...
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?
No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and se...
Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you...
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...
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...
Give me a book, she said. A book of sermons, anything.What do you want a book for?I want words. I’ve got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose.
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
Cranmer says, ‘We will try again with More. At least, if he refuses, he should give his reasons.’He swears under his breath, turns from the window. ‘We know his reasons. All Europe knows them. He is a...
But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.
At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you, and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and fa...