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.

Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

I'm suspicious of full-replacement programs - that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.

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.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

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.