And thus love makes fools of us all.

I was astonished to find that the positions my grandfather had defended were now overgrown and entangled with trees and thorns. I suppose I had developed a sense of reverence for the locations he described in his memoirs and letters - the forts and the high emplacements. I had expected them to have been preserved in some way.

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.

We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.

WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.

It was the month of May and there was warm sunshine dripping through the holes between the clouds, like the sky was a broken blue bowl and a child was trying to keep honey in it.