Anne B

I recently re-read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Are these now my two favorite books? I think so. And not just because they have added great words like umbles and gralloched to my vocabulary, should I have occasion to use them (though granted that seems unlikely). I could happily turn around and read both books straight through again. Hilary, where is volume 3?

Anne was wearing, that day, rose pink and dove grey. The colours should have had a fresh maidenly charm; but all he could think of were stretched innards, umbles and tripes, grey-pink intestines looped out of a living body; he had a second batch of recalcitrant friars to be dispatched to Tyburn, to be slit up and gralloched by the hangman. They were traitors and deserved the death, but it is a death exceeding most in cruelty. The pearls around her long neck looked to him like little beads of fat, and as she argued she would reach up and tug them; he kept his eyes on her fingertips, nails flashing like tiny knives."

– Bring Up the Bodies, p. 38