Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his… - Rebecca West

The moment ached, as if music were being played somewhere on an instrument whose strings had some connexion with her heart.

but it is not what one does so much as the way that while one does it time runs past forever.

The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again, then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakly King was hard to kill: when they threw him from the balcony they thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes, but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his left hand clutched the grass.