I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.

your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house.

Something I am now convinced of, after researching Everyone Brave, is that none of us is born courageous in all respects.

Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.

I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth)- Little Bee

Our stories are the tellers of us.

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.