Emma’s Reviews > Wolf Hall > Status Update

You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shrivelled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.

He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

There are twenty-one chapters. If it keeps raining I mean to read them all. Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and the cynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels.

Scriptura sola. Only the gospel will guide and console you. No use praying to a carved post or lighting a candle to a painted face.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

It is late; the whole great palace of York Palace is quiet, the city sleeping; the river creeping in its channels, silting its banks. In these matters, the cardinal says, there is no measure of time; these spirits slip from our hands and through the ages, serpentine, mutable, sly.