He turned his head to look around the room and I saw an imposing nose in profile, like a hothouse flower growing out of his face. It was strikingly attractive and strikingly large. He had a kind of resplendent excess of feature that made him look hyperreal.

You begin to know them, except time always leaves you one moment behind, and so you have to know them more, more and more, chasing them through time, at the limit where their life meets their future, and you need to have it, 360 degrees of what they see and feel and sense, or else your file is incomplete. Who did they love, before you? What hurt th

They haul the boats. They start by burying the dead in shallow graves, then, further on, piling rocks over the bodies in makeshift cairns, but soon there are too many dead. They leave the bodies where they drop. They haul. They abandon empty cans, trinkets, clothing. They leave bizarre oases of clutter, civilisation in its larval form. The notion o

Maybe I was tired of stories, telling them and hearing them. I thought the dream was to be post-: post-modern, post-captain, post-racial. Everyone wanted me to talk about Cambodia and I had nothing to teach them about Cambodia. If you learn something about Cambodia from this account, that’s on you.

Control’s lectures were nakedly about getting the narrative right. In their much-edited correctness, their placid-voiced hectoring, they bankrupted the energy in the room. Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.

‘You want a firmness of diction,’ mutters the doctor. He does not say you’re slurring, not to an officer.

‘The world is at war. We are running out of everything, and everyone thinks they’re owed what’s left. But as long as the Ministry exists, as long as the Ministry comes to exist in the shape it does in my era, then we have the technological advantage. That isn’t nothing, having weapons other people don’t, the kinds of soldiers other people don’t.

I started to laugh, a real, happy, unglamorous laugh. As true laughter does, it summoned smiles from the others. Margaret leant towards me, grinning, and I saw Graham catch Arthur’s eye and roll his. It was a moment among moments, but everyone was held in it, captured in a small and easy joy. I return again and again to this memory. It’s proof, you

‘What about all the stuff you said about not changing history?’ ‘People aren’t history,’ said Adela scornfully. ‘Good grief, why didn’t I listen to anything anyone told me when I was young? As long as the Ministry rises to power, then history happened the way we said it did.’