"If we still advise we shall never do."
- Elizabeth I
"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 ca..."
- Hilary Mantel
"Around thrones the thunder rolls."
- C.J. Sansom
"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 ta..."
"If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden..."
"Ann Boleyn...a Renaissance Audrey Hepburn in a little black dress."
- JoAnn Spears
"This building fool could only be Bess of Hardwicke, a woman whose name is seldom seen in print without the word “redoubtable” in front of it. I wondered if anyone ever called her redoubtable to her fa..."
"One of the great advantages ofhaving a library,your eminence,is that it is full of books."
- Michael Hirst