Tombland

I took the book and glanced at the page Guy was reading. I quoted, ‘The rich man’s substance is the wellspring of the poor man’s living.' Ah yes, that theory, that as the rich grow richer their wealth trickles down to the poor like sand. Well, I have been practising law twenty-five years and all I have seen is it trickle ever upwards.

Never in England were there so many gentlemen and so little gentleness.

Nicholas said, ‘I hear he’s ordered two million bricks for rebuilding that crumbling old family place of his in Wiltshire – what’s it called, Wolf’s Hole?’ ‘Wolf Hall. All paid for by the public purse, empty though it is.

by herself – what a woman,’ he

I despair when I look at the stuff that floods out of the printing presses now; Commonwealth men ranting against the rich, Calvin’s people’s warning of hellfire and the Apocalypse, the mad prophecies and lewd stories, the biting and slandering. I wish the damned press had never been invented.