I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.

I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people's eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.

Churchill was a brilliant and inspiring rhetorician, but one of the first things he did as the head of the British nation was to put German Jews in jail. Tens of thousands of Jews - who had just been fortunate enough to get out from under Hitler only a few years before - spent the entire war in jail.

I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.

There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise have. But I don't find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.

When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don't count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.