I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.

And I think that’s the spirit of Shakespeare, which somehow touched it . . . I don’t know what that process is or means, but it certainly takes place.

The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public.

Thomas More rarely discussed his siblings, and two of them are never mentioned by him. It is likely that they were part of that infant mortality which had provoked such concern for early baptism.

Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden...