George MacDonald Fraser

"I must emphasise that at private soldier level you frequently have no idea where you are, or precisely how you got there, let alone why."

"...the standard arm was the most beautiful firearm ever invented, the famous short Lee Enfield.......She's a museum piece now, but I still see her on T.V. newsreels, in the hands of hairy, outlandish …"

"It is a habit of great countries of imperial pretensions to take the future for granted, as the Romans did in Trajan's day, and as Britons, with a few far-sighted exceptions, did at Victoria's jubilee…"

"You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it. You may not like what you see, but do not on that acc…"

"We all have kindly impulses, fostered by two thousand years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have the killer instinct, too, the murderous impulse of the hunter..."

"But with today's mammoth papers the poor boobs have to write at ten times the length their subject is worth, and apart from over-padded news we have the curse of modern journalism, the proliferation o…"

"...a reluctance to recognise that today's safety and comfort were bought fifty years ago by means which today's intelligentsia find unacceptable, and from which they wish to distance themselves."

"For some reason which escapes me, there seems to be a feeling now that we have a moral duty to interfere in foreign disputes, and tell other countries how they should govern themselves, especially if …"