Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

Developments in information technology and globalised media mean that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war not on the battlefield of dust and blood but on the battlefield of world opinion.

I have traveled a long road from the battlefield to the peace table.

It was the courts of course that took away prayer from our schools that took away Bible reading from our schools. It's the courts that gave us same-sex marriage. So it is quite a battlefield and the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land.

Marriage is a lot of things - a source of love security the joy of children but it's also an interpersonal battlefield and it's not hard to see why: Take two disparate people toss them together in often-confined quarters add the stresses of money and kids - now lather rinse repeat for the rest of your natural life. What could go wrong?

There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.

On the battlefield the military pledges to leave no soldier behind. As a nation let it be our pledge that when they return home we leave no veteran behind.

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet than on the most memorable battlefields in history.