Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?’ I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. ‘What irony?’ I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. ‘That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.

War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept. There was a naivety and stupidity that war would be a great lark. It's not that different from Gone With The Wind, where all the young men can't wait to go off to fight and then two hours later in the movie, we see how the reality of that has come home to them.

Sitting around miserable all day won't make you any happier.

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.

Bruno: We're not supposed to be friends, you and me. We're meant to be enemies. Did you know that?

I like reading books about kids where there weren't really many adults, where they didn't need an adult to come and solve the problems for them. They could use their own ingenuity, use their own talents to solve whatever the issue was. And I like that still. I think that children want to read about heroic children. They don't want to read about children that have to be saved all the time.

He looked the boy up and down as if he had never seen a child before and wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to do with one: eat it, ignore it or kick it down the stairs.