All that technical expertise isn’t worth a damn if you don’t get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to...

I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat...

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

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in...

At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days...

As we drew nearer I saw a cathedral like a crown on the head of a city. In its white walls every window glinted in the sun. Lincoln! Of such places is England made. -“No...

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line...

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

Again, a conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: “The church may not mix in politics.” he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess...

Caleb tossed him an explosive and Japhet lunged to catch it before it hit the ground. He glared but Caleb didn’t notice. Instead, he started to whistle I didn’t raise my boy to be a...

The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and congratulated us on the complete desolation our planes had wrought. We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I...

Sturm, Swung, Wucht

Only victors have stories to tell,we the vanquished were then thought ofas cowards and weaklings whose memoriesand fears should not be remembered.

The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.

I was amongst them – the first female pilot who had got admission to the Sturmoviks…Since my childhood I’d been lucky enough to meet good people. Wherever I studied, wherever I worked I would meet...

The collective sign of relief heaved on V-J Day ought to have inspired Hollywood to release a flood of “happily ever after” films. But some victors didn’t feel too good about their spoils. They’d seen...

If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white walls- The Consumptive. Belsen 1945

Escapers were the cream of the crop.

(Thinking while being interrogated by the Germans) You big shots think you can decide on my life, but I have news for you: you can’t touch a hair on my head without the will of...

She could do anything with dynamite, except eat it.

If you live your life in fear and had the opportunity to change. . .could you muster the strength?

Odd, don’t you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men...

I may be a criminal lunatic, but I’m an AMERICAN criminal lunatic!

All the nut eaters and food faddists I have ever known, died early after a long period of senile decay – Winston Churchill

I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I don’t believe that we can blame our actions on our upbringings. If we could, then nobody would be responsible for anything they do.

I once asked an old Japanese man why Japan decided to team up with Germany during WWII, and do you know what he told me? Well, you would if you speak Japanese, which I don’t.

Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.

It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.

Yesterday the paper had a “short” summary of the places where Jews are not allowed! I can better mention where they are still aloud: “in their houses and in the streets!” God, punish those who...

Obsessed with Christine to the end, his last statement as he left his cell was, ‘to kill is the final possession’. But Muldowney was wrong. He had never possessed Christine; the resistance burning within her...

I…” He struggled to answer. “When everything was quiet, I went up to the corridor and the curtain in the livingroom was open just a crack… I could see outside. I watched, only for a...

His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.

God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.Surely, while we live we are not lost.Oh Janos, Janos my brother!Surely we are not lost–while we live.

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend...

The castle of Enysfarne was a dark and towering force that hovered over what was left of my innocence. It contained my destiny, of that I had no doubt whatsoever; a fate that threatened to...

Speaking of grandmas, have you heard the joke about grandparents and WWII? No? Well, if you do, be sure to tell me because I’d like to hear it too.

Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.

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...

After the prayer they executed an armed robbery. That sounds very strange this many years later: prayer and then armed robbery.

Christine did not live, or love, as most people do. She lived boundlessly, as generous as she could be cruel, prepared to give her life at any moment for a worthy cause, but rarely sparing...

here’s a toast to Alan Turingborn in harsher, darker timeswho thought outside the containerand loved outside the linesand so the code-breaker was brokenand we’re sorryyes now the s-word has been spokenthe official conscience woken– very...

The Japanese fought to win – it was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting and dirty business. Our commanders knew that if we were to win and survive, we must be trained realistically for it whether...

I wonder” he wrote, “if the day will ever come that the loveliest of hymns, Silent Night, will come into the minds of the people throughout the world to express the German heart. I belive...

Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! … How long the war...

In time of war, under the banner of an enemy recognisable as such, a foreigner from a camp outside the lines, the imperial idea grew strong in confidence and temper. The British democracy rallied to...

* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and...

War doesn’t start with an explosion….It bears far more subtlety. A simmer beneath the surface, as if bringing broth to a boil.

I knew why earlier generations once believed that the sun circled the earth. Because, in our limited imaginations, that is how we lived our lives. -Mrs. Tuesday’s Departure

By the end of the war, I could pick out Jewish people almost as if I had a sixth sense about it, even if they had blue eyes and blond hair. I would have been...

For a once renowned woman who loved telling tales of dodging bullets, wielding grenades and subverting dogs trained to kill, Christine’s story is, surprisingly, little known today.