People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.

The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.