Those who are made can be unmade.

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their...

Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.

Your fear is, that if you marry Adèle, you will love her. If you have children, you will love them more than anything else in the world, more than patriotism, more than democracy. If your...

He knows different now. It’s the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we...

When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can’t be so, you don’t get demons our side of the river, the guards won’t let...

He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.

It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.

But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and...

Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.

I picked up a snake once. In Italy.””Why did you do that?””For a bet.””Was it poisonous?””We didn’t know. That was the point of the bet.””Did it bite you?””Of course.””Why of course?””It wouldn’t be much of...

Feminism hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried.

She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.

And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at...

Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.

The thing people don’t understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine...

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough;...

I know she’s rather plain, but every girl has a right to conceal that fact from people who haven’t seen her.

… those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little,...

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you...

When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the...

The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there....

He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back...

The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.

There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can...

This visit has compacted the court’s quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town’s walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but...

Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it...

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...

I believe it’s fine to give up books even after a page; there’s so much to read in the world that will delight you, so why should you work against the grain?

You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of...

…this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness,...

Let’s say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends. How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even...

He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant....

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there’s not much difference between politics and sex; it’s all aboutpower. He...

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than hose of people who’d stayed at home.

Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we...

If Mary’s blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a...

He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, “Do you think I...

Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. “Good-bye,” he said. “Georges-Jacques–study law. Law is a weapon.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe...

One summer at the fag end of the nineties, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed....

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its...

Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn’t matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It’s the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty...

In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it’s Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it’s crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors....