Nicholas Shakespeare > Quotes

“Tell me. You're a man who understands history," I said. "If you want to start a revolution, why not issue a manifesto? Why not show the people who you are, what you're doing?"
He leaned back, grateful to explain. "That's perfectly understandable. Socrates wrote nothing down. Neither did Jesus. The problem with text is that it assumes it's own reality. It cannot answer, and it cannot explain.”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, The Dancer Upstairs

“We're none of us, are we, just one thing? I am a policeman, but also a father, a husband for the time being, a nursemaid to a sister who I pray will survive her illness. You are a journalist, a writer, and I don't know what else besides. To look at a person from a single angle is to deform them. Even if Yolanda is guilty...she is also afraid of the dark. And I cannot forget that I put her there.”
― Nicholas Shakespeare

“He was neither good looking nor ugly, and while he would not have turned a young girl's head, someone older might have been struck by his face and the evidence of passion which had left its traces. ~p17”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, The Dancer Upstairs

“I kept seeing Yolanda on the parquet, two men pinning her to the ground, her eyes loaded with hatred and madness combing her hair. I was stormed by her image and my heart could not bear it. We know so little about people. But about the people we love, we know even less.”
― Nicholas Shakespeare

“What they say here is true. Love is eternal for as long as it lasts.”
― Nicholas Shakespeare

“osteomyelitis, a serious bacterial infection of the”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France

“unimportant desk job in the Second World War,”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

“He tells not a half truth, but a truth and a half”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin

“I have their letters in front of me, three from Priscilla and one from Winnie. Together, they dramatise the proverb: ‘When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France (P.S.

“Two hours later, at 11.22 p.m, a large bell started tolling: the 13-ton Gros Bourdon of Notre Dame – the first time that Priscilla had heard its F-sharp since 1940. Soon, other church bells rang out over the darkened rooftops. The sound reached the Hôtel Meurice where General Choltitz, Military Commander of Greater Paris, was speaking to Berlin. He held the telephone to the window just as, five years before, an English correspondent had raised her receiver to catch the grinding of German tanks crossing the Polish border. Choltitz explained: ‘What you are hearing is that Paris is going to be liberated and that Germany without doubt has lost the war.”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France (P.S.

“Phantom Conspiracy,”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France

“former quarterback for the Brooklyn Dodgers”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

“Ian had greater trouble following Robert's principle of saying no, which Ian termed, "Fleming's Theory of the Imperative Negative.”
― Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man