She’s the kind of woman who’s misunderstood: they think because she’s so pretty and wears her clothes so well, and because she gossips and chatters, that she’s nothing but a ballerina in a jewelry box turning round and round; but I knew from her first letter that she’d a sharpness to her – I don’t think she misses anything, not even now.

She’d never know what to do with children: Francis had wrong-footed her so completely that she’d come to think of them as delightful but volatile species no more to be trusted than cats.

Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past. Oranges and lemons rang the chimes of St Clement’s, and Westminster’s division bell was dumb.

Did you really think you could carry on like that- you never wanted friends or lovers – you wanted courtiers! What you have on your hands is a peasants’ revolt.

CLEAVE. To cleave to something is to cling to it with all your heart, he said, but to cleave something apart is to break it up.

But she’d learned the humility of scholars: that the more she knew, the more she did not know.

What a mess, he thought: what a mess we make. If love were an archer someone had put out its eyes, and it went stumbling about, blindly letting loose its arrows, never meeting its mark.

What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split, and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk out on the river?

Of course it seems completely contradictory and wholly unjustifiable, but then the best minds can hold two opposing thoughts at once.

We think we know where we’re aiming, and perhaps we do – but morning comes, and a change in the light, and we find out we should’ve been trying in a different direction after all.