Clear skin, a manicure, a couple dead zombies, and then fame!

You come to this place, mid-life. You don__ know how you got here, but suddenly you__e staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn__. When the midwife says, __t__ a boy,_ where does the girl go? When you think you__e pregnant, and you__e not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.

I knew that I was talented. I was positive about that. I wasn__ sure exactly what I was talented at, but I was ambitious enough to wait it out and see what turned up.

In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it__ Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it__ crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It__ climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days.

Happiness never made anyone rich or famous. That must be why ambitious people avoid it.

Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.