By the tits of Holy Agnes

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 strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.

[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.