This week’s selection of quotes which caught my eye during the last week …

Everyone has a photographic memory … Some just don’t have film.
[Thoughts of Angel]

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
[Kurt Vonnegut]

Which links quite nicely to the following two …

We now return to the spring of 1593 and the events leading up to the killing of Christopher Marlowe … with a new understanding of the continuity of secret politics as a factor in his life. He is remembered as a poet … and as a wild young blasphemer in an age of enforced devotion, but he was also a spy … one of hundreds of such men, part of a maverick army of intelligencers and projectors on which the government of the day depended, sometimes out of a genuine need for information, but often in ways that relate more to political expediency, to courtly in-fighting, to police-state repression.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]

As we have found, time and again, informers have often a need to create information. They are ‘projectors’ who provoke or indeed invent dangerous sentiments in order to denounce them. They are ‘politicians’ in that pejorative Elizabethan sense, the sense in which Shakespeare means it when King Lear says, ‘Get thee glass eyes and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not’.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]