Quotes from Colin Falconer

Anyone who gives a lot of money to the poor must have robbed them first . . . poverty is only the result of the workers not getting proper reward for their labor.

His fellow monks carried him back to his cell and laid him on the hard cot that had been his bed for the last twenty years. He was an old man now and there was nothing to be done. His eyes had the cold sheen of death. A brother went to fetch the abbot so that the old fellow might make his last confession.

The head had been impaled on a railing outside the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand in the early hours of a cold November morning. There was a fine dusting of frost on the corpse's hair and eyelids which gave it a festive touch.

This love your minstrels sing of, must it always be a knight and a lady? Who made this law? Was it God? Then God is a trickster, for there is no one else will do for me.

Kitty O'Kane dreamed of a kind husband and a just life; what she had was haddock water for supper and a dribble of her own blood, seen at close quarters, on the toe of her father's scuffed boot.

The dead man looked disconsolate. Reasonably so, in the circumstances, Charlie thought.

God chose Fabricia Bérenger during a lightning storm. With one thunderous touch of his finger, he sent her reeling.

He couldn't organize a fuck in a barrel full of whores.

You will love this man. Do you understand? You will love him, serve him, and obey him in all things. This is your duty to me and to France. Am I clear?' Isabella is twelve years old and astoundingly pretty, a woman in a girl's body. She keeps her eyes on the floor and nods her head.

They call my little Joan the most beautiful woman in all England. Well, every father thinks that about his daughter. That she is special, and prettier. But I never had the opportunity to boast. My name is Edmund of Woodstock and I am the son of a king and the brother of a king and the grandfather of a king.

I was twenty-nine years old when I died. Died; I use the term loosely. I was murdered, but within the dictates of the law and with the full approval of the king, even though he was barely eighteen years at the time.