3.67 avg rating — 625 ratings

"This morning His Holiness summoned me to read to him from St Augustine, while the physician applied unguents and salves to his suppurating arse; one in particular, which was apparently concocted from virgin's piss (where did they find a virgin in Rome?) and a rare herb from the private hortus siccus of Bonet de Lattes, the pope's Jewish physician-in-chief, stank abominably."

4.24 avg rating — 1,015 ratings

"Albert, fleshy, sallow, blue chinned, breathing hard, sweating a little, fitted an iron bar into sockets on either side of the wooden shutters he had just closed across the final window of the stable-block."

3.56 avg rating — 613,200 ratings

3.60 avg rating — 14,677 ratings