We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

All history, of course, is the history of wars.

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.