Early in The Mirror and The Light, the third part of her excellent Thomas Cromwell trilogy, the late Hilary Mantel presents a remembered conversation between Cromwell and the soon-to-be-executed George Boleyn, brother of the erstwhile Queen Anne Boleyn, herself on the way to the executioner’s block. A short exchange between the two men stood out to me, for all that it has to say about out own power-mad world:

‘I have read the gospel, but not followed it,’ George said. ‘I think I have hardly understood it. If I had done so, I would be a living man as you are. I should have lived quiet, away from court. And disdained the world, its flatteries. I should have eschewed all vanities, and laid aside ambition.

‘Yes,’ he said ‘but we never do it. None of us. We have all read the sermons. We could write them ourselves. But we are vain and ambitious all the same, and we never do live quiet, because we rise in the morning and we feel the blood coursing in our veins and we think, by the Holy Trinity, whose head can I stamp on today? What worlds are at hand, for me to conquer? Or at the least we think, if God made me a crewman on his ship of fools, how can I murder the drunken captain, and steer it to port and not be wrecked?