There's something brave and touching about game girls of all ages keeping themselves smart in hard times - one thinks of those wonderful women during World War II drawing stocking seams in eyebrow pencil up the back of legs stained with gravy browning because nylons were so hard to get hold of.

What we want to do is reform the welfare system in the way that Tony Blair talked about 13 years ago but never achieved - a system that was created for the days after the Second World War. That prize is now I think achievable.

You know the period of World War I and the Roaring Twenties were really just about the same as today. You worked and you made a living if you could and you tired to make the best of things. For an actor or a dancer it was no different then than today. It was a struggle.

In the months leading up to World War II there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

We didn't start this war - the right wing did. We're tired of seeing good-paying jobs shipped overseas. This fight is about the economy it's about jobs and it's about rebuilding America.

War continues to divide people to change them forever and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.

I have a friend that is a WWII buff and we sat and talked a lot about stuff like the war and the reasons behind it and you now it's all in the uniform. Once you're in it it usually does all the work for you.

There aren't a lot of guys like me left. But I'm a war horse. I've been through it all. And you know something about war horses? Through the sleet through the snow they just keep going.

One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is you'd see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.

I remember the '80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me it was kind of a dark depressing time.

It's a tough thing to know what to do about a war that deep in your gut you feel is wrong and yet watch your peers going off to fight in that war.

I thought the Vietnam war was an utter unmitigated disaster so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.

I was the guy who was constantly speaking out against the Vietnam War. I have no regrets about that.

We've got to keep an eye on the battle that we face - a war on workers. And you see it everywhere. It is the Tea Party. And there's only one way to beat and win that war - the one thing about working people is we like a good fight.

If anything we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.

You might hold an ethical position that it's wrong to lie but if you have plans for a war in Iraq and you want to keep them secret for practical reasons - to reduce casualties perhaps - and someone asks you about those plans you may need to lie for a 'good' outcome.

Say what you want to say about the rest of his presidency including his tone-deaf response to Katrina and a war waged in Iraq on false pretenses Bush connected with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 because he looked as frail and unforgiving as we felt.