The novelist Alexander Baron, who experienced some of the fiercest fighting in the Second World War, brings us a slice of ‘humour in uniform’ in his story ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’, narrated in the first person.

An apt nickname
It is at an army training school that the narrator first meets ‘Private Quelch’. Both are cadets, but the tall and thin Private Quelch, who frowns through his spectacles, soon gets the nickname …