For who can speak of the Mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?
DYER. (Sits down) There was nothing that I recall save that the Sunne was a Round flat shining Disc and the Thunder was a Noise from a Drum or a Pan. VANNBRUGGHE. (Aside) What a Child is this! (To Dye...
Well,' said Hawksmoor. 'It's a theory and a theory can do no harm.
One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.
And when the Duke of Alva ordered three hundred Citizens to be put to Death together at Antwerp, a Lady who saw the Sight was presently afterwards deliver'd of a Child without a Head. So lives the Pow...
A letter from a French cleric to Nicholas of St. Albans, written c. 1178, rehearsed what was already a familiar perception: Your island is surrounded by water, and not unnaturally its inhabitants are...
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
…a lie, once uttered, changes reality just as surely as if it were a great truth.
The English seem to relish unsystematic learning of this kind, in the same manner that they embarked upon Grand Tours of Europe in pursuit of a peripatetic scholarship.
But didn't you know? Everything is made up.
Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-wal...
It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of...
On his thirteenth birthday he had seen a film in which the central character was a painter who, unable to sell his work, grew cold and hungry as he went from one unsuccessful interview to the next; ev...
I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been att...
The value is always in the eye of the beholder. What is worthless to one person may be very important to someone else.
The bell of Limehouse Church rang as each of them, in this house, drifted into sleep - suddenly once more like children who, exhausted by the day's adventures, fall asleep quickly and carelessly. A so...
But there were four things I taught Walter to consider: 1) That it was Cain who built the first City, 2) That there is a true Science in the World called Scientia Umbrarum which, as to the publick tea...
I am the scourge of God
…sorrow was always the bedfellow of depravity.
Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.