Historical Novelists

"‘What's the verdict?’ ‘A shining new talent. A breathtaking story, written with mystical intensity. An author who will sell and sell.’"

"He wore the purple; it was his entitlement. With it he had neither wreath nor jewels. For him the best adornment of rank was acute native intelligence."

"Smartness always helps in gaining access to the houses of the wealthy. Anyone with a clean face is acceptable to thugs."

"Luck is a wonderful luxury. What could better prove that some are born under a star of good fortune than the career (and the large, comfortable home) of the Great King?"

"'Do you want a cretin or a meddler?' 'Which is better for us?' 'Whoever gets the larger backhander.' 'We won't pay. We are going for probity.' 'Can't afford true justice, eh?'"

"Not all the fine civic building programmes in the world would ever displace the raw forces that drive most of humankind. This was the true city: greed, corruption and violence."

"The new "humour", if you can call it that, is pure malicious gossip. Instead of making a genuine point, it's now good enough to repeat any ribald story without a thought for whether it's even true."

"I asked why Grumio had had to turn to lesser things.'No call. In my father or grandfather's day all I would have needed in life were my cloak and shoes, my flask and strigil, a cup and knife to take to dinner, and a small wallet for my earnings. Everyone who could find the wherewithal would eagerly ask a wandering jokesmith in.' 'Sounds just like being a vagrant philosopher!' 'A cynic,' he agreed readily. 'Exactly. Most cynics are witty and all clowns are cynical. Meet us on the road, and who could tell the difference?’ 'Me, I hope! I'm a good Roman. I'd take a five-mile detour to avoid a philosopher.'"

"In fact, making up a spiteful lie has become respectable. Today's "jesters" are outright public nuisances."

"You're not bloody Aristophanes, and the people who are paying for tickets are not educated Athenians. We're acting for turnips who only come to talk to their cousins and fart. We have to give them a lot of action and low-level jokes, but you can leave all that to us on stage. We know what's required. Your job is to hone the basic framework and remember the simple motto: short speeches, short lines, short words."

"Communicating wit is a lonely art. It demands an independent soul."

"The world is full of people slandering their birthplaces, as if they really believe that small-town life is different elsewhere."

"In an ideal world I ought to have gone with him to observe their reactions, but in an ideal world heroes never get tired or depressed; what's more, heroes are paid more than me."

"Marcus! I thought you must have been developing other interests, but I never expected to find you with your arms locked round a fish..."

"Justice never paid a poor man's bills."

"I had been right in the first place. Getting involved with politicians is complete stupidity."

"We marched him to the turfy shack where he lived with his parents and while the youth sulked Petronius Longus put the whole moral issue in succinct terms to them: Ollia’s father was a legionary veteran who had served in Egypt and Syria for over twenty years until he left with double pay, three medals, and a diploma that made Ollia legitimate; he now ran a boxers’ training school where he was famous for his high-minded attitude and his fighters were notorious for their loyalty to him… The old fisherman was a toothless, hapless, faithless cove you would not trust too near you with a filleting knife, but whether from fear or simple cunning he co-operated eagerly. The lad agreed to marry the girl and since Silvia would never abandon Ollia here, we decided that the fisherboy had to come back with us to Rome. His relations looked impressed by this result. We accepted it as the best we could achieve."

"Stick with it, Xanthus. There are fortunes to be made out of bristle for a man with deft hands."

"Petronius would take his free bread buns and run. I happened to know that since Petro had been elected to the watch he had never cast a vote. He believed a man on a public salary should be impartial. I didn’t agree but I admired him being so stubborn in his eccentricities. Aufidius Crispus would be an unusual politician if he had allowed for such morality in the voters he was courting."

"The plumber plodded along in silence, like a man who has learned to be polite to lunatics through dealing with civil engineers."

"He listened with the mild demeanour of a man who had waited eight years for his town council to draw up a specification for emergency repairs."

"You could tell those two had been married by the way that she ignored him."

"She called me a rat.” “Oh yes, I gathered you two were very close!"

"But mere technical details can be worked out any time. All a hero needs is grit."

"Love and death are gritty subjects. Their appropriate handling by poets does not require myrtle petals and violets."

"When I hear the words 'social order', I start looking around for somebody to pick a fight with."

"I was tough. I used everything to my advantage. I could be very ruthless."

"Research to me is as important, or more important, than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built."

"Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human."

"A soldier has one item that cannot be neglected. His feet. They are his wheels, his mechanised warfare."

"The greatest commanders never issue orders. Rather, they compel by their own acts and virtue the emulation of those they command. The great champions throw leadership back on you. They make you answer: Who am I? What do I seek? What is the meaning of my existence in this life?"

"I love a guy who knows how to bitch. Any moron can gripe about chow or rotations, but someone who can get exercised over architecture is my kind of dude."

"In the end the American dream boils down to what? I'm getting mine and to hell with you."

"You English are loath to embrace the virtues of the warrior. Such an act embarrasses you. You prefer to see yourselves as civilians summoned reluctantly to arms, as-what is the word?-'amatuers.' But you are warriors, you English. You are, Chapman. Trust me, who has faced you in the field."

"The Mammoth we attacked was not Rommel's after all. [...] Rommel himself, we'll learn later, was not in that camp and never had been. At the time of our raid, he was with the 15th Panzer Division, somewhere west of Kidney Ridge, in the thick of the fighting at El Alamein."

"These are armed enemy, who have hastened to this site with one object only: to take the lives of my comanions and me. I must take theirs first. No truth could be plainer. Yet at the same time nothing can alter the fact that beneath the fascist insignia of their uniforms, these men are fathers, husbands, sons."

"The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death."

"Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman's complaint lies not with his circumstance, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That's why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they're angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh."

"One act I will never stand for is leaving our fellows behind. Bugger military protocol, or lofty notions of honour. I can't live with running out on a pal, and I won't let any of you do it either."

"I could be counted upon to perform the mission they had assigned me, or, if that was unworkable, to improvise and turn my men's exertions upon a secondary undertaking as good as or better than the first."

"I had become someone they could look to for leadership and direction, who would shield from meddling from above, and would ask no act of them that he wasn't prepared to perform himself. I provided for my men a framework within which they were freed to use their own qualities of courage, resourcefulness and tenacity."

"To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be."

"It is a terrible thing to be a king, especially a great one, for one must serve ideals of the spirit at the price of lovers of flesh and blood. Who profits from a king's fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care?"

"The foe fell back. Our companies pushed through. For the time it takes to count to five hundred, I thought we might even conquer. For now the mulishness of the Athenian Soldier-farmer, the pigheaded refusal to yield which had at first been scorned by his betters-now this shone to the fore. By the gods, these clodkickers had learned how to fight! [...] They no longer fell apart at the apparition of cowardice among their comrades or themselves, but had come to understand that the same man may play the craven in the morning and the hero in the afternoon. Give them this: they were tough. Tougher than the Scyths and Getai, for all their savage valor, and tougher than the Amazons, despite their dash and dazzle."

"Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance."

"A youth loathes nothing more than his own callowness. Experience is his object. Experience, however ghastly, for the lad longs before all for the lined face and the chiseled squint of the vetern."

"Humankind is commanded to ascend from savagery. This is God's mandate, which cries out from the epicenter of our being: the imperative to mount from the base to the noble, from the savage to the civil, from beast to human."

"Straight to her face advanced the Athenian Lykos, and it must be said that it took no slender spirit for him to do so, such was the light of slaughter in the Amazon's eyes. "What do you call this, thou savage!" The prince gestured to the broth irrigating the walls and floors of the canyon. "Are these God's footsteps?" Is this the 'path of holiness' in which your race treads?" Theseus hastened forward, reining-in at his countryman's shoulder. "This is not war," Lykos bellowed to Antiope. "It is butchery!" Theseus sought to speak, as if to offer extenuation for the actions of the Amazons. Lykos cut him off with a curse. "You cannot defend the indefensible!""

"At Athens and Athens alone, a new stamp of person was being born, neither baron nor yeoman, but a man of the city. A citizen."

"Bear your command with humility. Lead, do not condescend. Remember, these are great events and men will rise to them. Treat every man as a Soldier. He may surprise you and be one."