MindProbe

“Do you not want to rule the world, Nicator Seleucus? Do you not want your name whispered from Athens to the banks of the Indus? Hear the bards singing your fame for posterity and the cities minting your coins? The armies carrying your banners and the warriors piercing the clouds with your name? Do you not want all of that, Seleucus?”
― Moris Farhi, Doctor Who: Farewell, Great Macedon

“Even though – perhaps because – we are in no doubt about his ruthless self-interest, Richard establishes an immediate alliance from the outset. This intimacy with the audience will be carefully managed through a stream of asides and sardonic remarks, where only we know his true meaning, keeping us from forming any real attachment to any other character. The very title of the play seems to have succumbed to his charms and to endorse his ambitions. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, doesn’t actually become King Richard III until Act 4, but his play has no doubt he will get there: from the opening he is the king-in-waiting.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“Shakespeare is complex, like living, not technically and crackably difficult, like crosswords or changing the time on the cooker”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States