No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.

Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into...

We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when...

The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn’t have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die – anything to stop remembering.

In my fantasies, I was always caught up in heroic struggles, and I saw myself saving lives, sacrificing myself for others. I had far loftier ambitions than mere romance.

Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in...

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of...

Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after...

In seven days God had created the Earth. In a single day mankind had turned it upside down.

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she...

Roy

if something does go wrong, here is my advice… KEEP CALM and CARRY ON.

‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn’t greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize...

What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is...

…we’re dealing with two devils who both want to rule hell.

A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I...

The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.

There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military...

That name was a sadistic play on the Underground Railroad that smuggled American slaves north. The old Nazis set up their own version and used it mainly to move their people. They called it Die...

On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing,...

That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn’t let too much truth seep into your conversation,...

I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn’t expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since...

She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting.

It is well to remember that the stomach governs the world,” wrote Churchill when planning the feeding of his troops on the north-west Indian frontier at the tail-end of the nineteenth century.

And she felt the beauty in the music now, drank it in with tears streaming down her face. Never had she been so naked in worship before her Creator, allowing the adoration to bleed out...

I was on one of my world ‘walkabouts.’ It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew...

In wartime, everyone’s birthday turns into a commemoration of something so sad.

Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism… neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds...

It doesn’t happen to me anymore, because a fresh generation of Africans and Asians has arisen to take over the business, but in my early years in Washington, D.C., I would often find myself in...

A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.

This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every...

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where...

Does the surgeon spare the cancer because he must cut to remove it? We are cruel. Of course we are cruel.

Above all, let’s hope we never take ourselves too seriously.