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Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers.

This was the remnant of honour, nostalgic for spurious legendary times.

Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.

The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek.

Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations.

There are people out there who’d rather be tools than people.

That was how he did it. He was never just a thug. Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

“I know, I know,” Moore said. “Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?” Shook his head. “What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?”

He planned his funeral, his oration, the invitations, the snubs, but that, death itself, was always Plan B. How, he would have said to his specialists, might we bypass this unpleasantness?