No thanky-you; you can’t overcome hatred with more hatred. Force can kill the liar but not the lie, the hater but not the hate, and the violent but not the violence. Hate begets hate, violence...

Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H.G. Wells-style world – a horrific, fantastic society in which people’s faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children...

Alfred is taken past this broom, and enters this room; which can only be described as ‘piecemeal’. It is full of pieces of fish-market paraphernalia, pieces of military-regalia; and pieces of rusted-steel.It is full of...

As Ramses did the same for his mother, he saw that her eyes were fixed on him. She had been unusually silent. She had not needed his father’s tactless comment to understand the full implications...

It’s finding out where we came from that helps guide us to where we are going.

Her soul died that night under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the side of a blood-spattered trench. Around her lay the mangled dead and the dying. Her body was untouched,...

She did not respond, only clung harder to my embrace, and I held her with all the afflictions of a man torn by love. What a miracle she was, what a truly exquisite paragon of...

When her grandchildren would whine with words resembling ‘I’m hungry’, my Oma would tenderly correct us with ‘No, you feel like eating’ which to me seemed be the same thing. Oma had survived Amsterdam during...

It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal,...

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one...

Shut your mouth – there’s a bus coming.

Sometimes time can play tricks. One moment it idles by, an hour can seem a lifetime, such as when sitting by the river at dusk watching the bats snatching insects above the limpid waters; the...