Let me unfold to you,” he says, “the way my thoughts proceed.
Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.
Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.
And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear.
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. Then, the moment you given, they get up and walk away and lose all interest. The next week they will pass you by as if they don’t know you.
If he’s not watering his ale, he’s running illegal beasts on the common, if he’s not despoiling the common he’s assaulting an officer of the peace, if he’s not drunk he’s dead drunk, and if he’s not dead before his time there’s no justice in this world.
Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace.
Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you.
I remembered the young man with his broad white smile and his ashen hair streaked with gold; the basted perfection of his firm flesh, and the grace of his hand clasping mine. I slotted the notes back inside, slid my purse away, and wondered: which of my defects did he notice first?
In the end, Dr Bhattacharya had said, the heart fails without warning.
The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.
She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don’t want your dinner.
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 on either side. He can quibble, and stand on semantics. It’s a living, he thinks; but it isn’t. For there comes the bald question, the one choice out of two: do you want a revolution, M. de Robespierre? Yes, damn you, damn all of you, I want it, we need it, that’s what we’re going to have.
If your going to be ugly it is well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.
Render me the texture of flesh. Pick me what it is, in the timbre of the voice, that marks out the living from the dead.
Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth,” he says, “set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the center. Straight to where you should be.
They are en route to Farnham, a small hunting party, when a report is galloped along the road: cases of plague have appeared in the town. Henry, brave on the battlefield, pales almost before their eyes and wrenches around his horse’s head: where to? Anywhere will do, anywhere but Farnham.
Never mind.” He thinks, “tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.
These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win. “Still serving your Hebrew God, I see,” remarks Sir Thomas More. “I mean, your idol Usury.” But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets; when More is settling in for a session of self-scourging, he and Rafe are sprinting to Lombard Street to get the day’s exchange rates.
I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.