It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.

What's somewhat puzzling is that Churchill himself knew what the reaction would be to any sort of aerial attack on cities, because in 1938 he said that in a future war British cities would be attacked by bombing, and that the response would be that all men would want to join the fight because they would be so incensed by this cowardly manner of attack. Which is a very natural response: when something drops on you from the air and blows up a bunch of buildings and kills people in their sleep, the reaction is going to be rage, confusion, and a search for something to destroy in retaliation.

First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn't problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read.

You need the art in order to love the life.

I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue - a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren't libelous or otherwise illegal.

Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.

When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.