That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.

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.

Sometimes we don't notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.

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.

Courage is a muscle that develops through use. It's no use waiting for some inner fire to conveniently become apparent at the moment of crisis - that's cartoon stuff.