Georges was in a rage. It is a spectacle to comtemplate, his rage. He tore off his cravat, strode about the room, his throat and chest glistening with sweat, his voice shaking the windows. This bloody...
Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
Do you know Camille Desmoulins? he asked. Have you seen him? He’s one of these law-school boys. Never used anything more dangerous than a paper knife. He shook his head wonderingly.Where do they come...
History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at...
[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap...
You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged somewhere, he will batter down your door, walks in and wipe...
You . . . person, he says; and again, you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.
There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeti...
People said— though this felt like a heresy— that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh.
Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read, and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.
It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.
In truth you cannot separate them, your public being and your private self.
In the year 1257, an elephant died in the Tower menagerie and was buried in a pit near the chapel. But the following year he was dug up and his remains sent to Westminster Abbey. Now, what did they wa...
In a generation everything can change.
If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy...469
I was (an am) unsure about how I am related to my old self, or to myself from year to year. The hormonal profile of an individual determines much of the manifest personality. If you skew the endocrine...
I never know why Hope is accounted a virtue, Camille said. It seems so selfserving.
I look like a watermelon with a great slice hacked out. I say to myself, it's just another border post on the frontier between medicine and greengrocery; growths and tumour seem always to be described...
His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnis...
He cannot lock us all up. He has prisons enough. For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods, but God will prosper us. He can close the booksellers, but still there will be books. They...