Quotes from Robert Harris

The events of 1940 and 1941 showed that when a country has its back to the wall it is unlikely to put obligations like the Geneva Protocol ahead of military expediency.

Against the alchemy of two naked bodies in a bed in the darkness, and against all the complex longings and attachments and commitments such intimacy might arouse, he had nothing with which to fight.

In Germany now there are three choices,' Kammler told them. 'You are shot by the SS, you are imprisoned by the SS, or you work for the SS.

Cicero himself appeared, hand in hand with Tullia, nodding good morning to everyone, greeting each by name ("the first rule in politics, Tiro: never forget a face").

I doubt they'd kill me. And if they did—well, what does it matter? I'm old, and there could be no better death than in defence of freedom.

Appeasement is simply an attempt to redress those same wrongs.

Go and do your business, Mr Nayler. There will soon be heads on spikes all over London. But bear in mind that one day one of them may be mine.

Die Unfehlbarkeit des Papstes gilt für die Glaubenslehre. Nicht für die Ernennungen." [von Kardinälen]

It is at this point that I'm afraid you lose me. You want my country to go to war to prevent three million Germans joining Germany, on the off chance that you and your friends can then get rid of Hitler? Well, I have to say, from what I've seen today, he looks pretty well entrenched to me.

Cato was always the perfect Stoic, as long as nothing went wrong.

Wir brauchen eine Kirche, die die Welt bewegt, keine, die sich mit der Welt bewegt

In the United Kingdom – that godless isle of apostasy

As praetor, Cicero was expected to take in promising pupils from good families to study law with him, and in May, after the Senate recess, a new young intern of sixteen joined his chambers. This was Marcus Caelius Rufus from Interamnia, the son of a wealthy banker and prominent election official of the Velina tribe. Cicero agreed, largely as a political favor, to supervise the boy's training

The kulaks were contagious. Their souls were contagious. They carried the spores of counter-revolution.

let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end........Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.

People who succeed in life are rarely reflective. Their gaze is always on the future: that's why they succeed.

All his depths were on the surface.

Always very pious, these crooked accountants,' observed Cicero.)

Perhaps he wanted to make Monsieur Daladier feel at home by dressing as the Michelin Man?

vol-au-vents.

In the clear late-autumn light, the forests were a profusion of reds and golds, interrupted occasionally by large patches of black, like holes burnt in a Turkish carpet.

Jericho lowered himself carefully to his knees. He covered his eyes and moved his lips like all the others, but he had no faith in any of it. Faith in mathematics, yes; faith in logic, of course; faith in the trajectory of the stars, yes, perhaps. But faith in a God, Christian or otherwise?

How drab the British and the French looked in their office suits, crumpled after their long journeys, compared to the uniforms of the SS and the Italian fascists. How unvirile; how dowdy and outnumbered.

You always knew if a film was out of synch, however fractionally; you always knew if someone fancied you, however improbably; and you always knew when someone was on your tail.