The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rec

glorious ironwork chandeliers,

Nell would have been dazzled by Colonel Napier if she had not recently seen him strapped to a rack. Still, there was something about this very contradiction that made him, and by extension all Victorian men, fascinating to her. They lived a life of nearly perfect emotional denial—a form of asceticism as extreme as that of a medieval stylite. Yet th

“Information technology has freed cultures from the necessity of owning particular bits of land in order to propagate; now we can live anywhere. The Common Economic Protocol specifies how this is to be arranged.

In an era when everything can be surveiled, all we have left is politeness.

But Nell's eyes had an appearance of feral alertness that seized the attention of anyone who met her.

she suspected that she could see a beautiful sunset from the room in the high tower where she had established her library. It was a long climb up a dank and mildewy staircase that wound up the inside of the Dark Castle's highest tower.

Watching Napier at work, watching the medals and braid swinging and glinting on his jacket, Nell realized that it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearl

We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. “Common as the air” meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver glow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin a