However small we made ourselves, we took space and air from our neighbours. We were a torment to one another.

But one should not trust first impulses. Instinct is not always a safe counsellor by any means.

It was not living, it was vegetation. We longed for death.

It has always been a blessed experience with me after an illness to feel that I was recovering.

There were of course exceptions, but on the whole the “intellectuals” among us withstood the hardships of the journey resignedly and patiently. They proved to be tougher, quieter, more uncomplaining than many men from other walks of life who were physically stronger and physically better trained.

The years that had passed had displayed vividly before our eyes the fickleness of human attitudes.

I am a slow worker, but I could have written at least two books more in the time that I have been obliged to spend waiting around public offices and in the back yards of recruiting stations – waiting unnecessarily for unnecessary things.

Had I not been thinking always of the ludicrous aspects of my own plight, or of the plight of others, I could not have survived that depressing, degrading experience without spiritual harm.

I am always thinking of that remark of Theodor Lessing, which I quoted earlier in this book, that history is “the art of giving meaning to the meaningless.

There’s only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but there’s no road leading from the ridiculous to the sublime.