Fall of Giants: The Century Trilogy 1

by Ken Follett

He wondered how much Mam would allow him for pocket money, and whether he would ever be able to save enough for a bicycle, which he wanted more than anything else in the world.

Nothing known to mankind was superior to the comfortable order of monarchy, aristocracy, merchant and peasant.

Little things please little minds.’

War would be his chance to be useful, to prove his courage, to serve his country, to do something in return for the wealth and privilege that had been lavished on him all his life.

The poor shambled and limped along roads where the rich strode confidently.

‘He was a good man, ma’am,’ she said. ‘Never raised a hand to me.’ The Queen did not know what to say about a man whose virtue was that he did not beat his wife.

Maud liked the way Mozart made masters and servants sing together, showing the complex and intimate relationships between upper and lower orders.

She had often wondered why women married. They contracted themselves to a lifetime of slavery and, she had asked, what did they get in return?

‘The truth is not arrived at by majority vote.’

It took two people to make a baby, but only one was obliged to look after it. How had women let themselves get into such a weak position?

‘We both did it,’ he said defensively, glancing at the bed. ‘But only one of us is going to have a baby.’

‘God spare us from men of destiny,’

There were certain things one had to do before one could really call oneself a man, and fighting for king and country was among them.

‘I think more people should shoot newspaper editors,’ Maud said gaily. ‘It might improve the press.’

How strange and wonderful it was, she thought, to be able to bring such happiness to another person.

Grigori’s body hurt and he felt ill, but all the same it was a joy to him to be walking arm in arm with Katerina as the sun rose over the dilapidated houses and the dirty streets.

On his last day as a civilian he had quarrelled with the woman he adored. If he died in battle now, he would die unhappy. What a rotten world, he thought; what a lousy life.

he could not help feeling that he was on an adventure that could be exciting as well as terrible.

Patriotism was not so simple, he had learned.

He might return to Wellington Row, but he would never again be the boy who had lived here.

Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire.

War suited him. He liked the excitement, the hurry, the quick decisions, and the sense of constant emergency.

In the struggle for female equality, Maud reflected, sometimes you had to fight women as well as men.

They needed to see the world beyond their small houses, Ethel thought, something to remind them that life was not bound within four jerry-built walls.

‘Now everything, everything must change.’

My dearest darling, It is winter in Germany and in my heart.

‘How can men be so stupid as to go to war?’

her smile was a sunbeam.

‘There are moments in the life of a man, and of a nation, when it is right to say: I have done my utmost, and I can do no more, therefore I will cease my striving, and seek another road.

Incompetent, bewildered, and miserably unhappy, he was a standing argument against hereditary monarchy.

He began to wonder whether overthrowing the Government might have been the easy part.

He recalled the words of his mother on the day she died: ‘I will not rest until Russia is a republic.’ Rest, now, Mother, he thought.

She looked too thoroughbred for this place, like a racehorse in a farmyard.

‘This is the problem of having an empire. Riff-raff from all over the world think they’re part of it.’

Fitz had an unnerving feeling that Bolshevism might be coming to London, not by revolution but by stealth.

A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.

‘The Bolshevik regime should be strangled at birth,’ Winston said. He looked thoughtful. ‘Strangled at birth,’ he repeated, pleased with the expression.

All his life he would cherish the memory of an endless caravan of camels alongside the railway line, the laden beasts plodding patiently through the snow, ignoring the twentieth century as it hurtled past them in a clash of iron and a shriek of steam.

‘The ability to listen to smart people who disagree with you is a rare talent

If you owe a hundred dollars, the bank has you in its power; but if you owe a million dollars, you have the bank in your power.’

They had waited half the night to see the passing of the train that held the hope of the world.

She was crying for the lost years, and the millions of boys lying dead, and the pointless, stupid waste of it all.

The degradation to which you subject others comes back, sooner or later, to haunt you,

‘Socialism means freedom, even for counter-revolutionaries.’ ‘No it doesn’t!’ ‘It does to me.’