Written shortly after "Brideshead" but published only posthumously, it is immeasurably stronger: a fierce, subtle, layered portrait of a boy, both vulnerable and armed, in mid-joust through an English boarding school.

The streets are no longer congested with armed boys selling cheap highs by the fistful.

The heavily armed boys headed to the cars, which took them to the staging area slightly before sunset.

We found the spoor, found too that it was impossible to follow the brute on account of the bush, then, after leaving two armed boys to herd the cattle, we turned back.

And as for Somaliland, as long as we are free from international obligations, let us enjoy what we have and think about how one day we could send 200000 well armed boys to Somalia and claim our share, as other nations in the region are doing.

A fire was smouldering in a rough depression scraped in the ground, heating a metal dome on which a one armed boy was laying naan breads to cook.

And he looked on listlessly from his regal perch on Rambo's lap as a group of armed boys raced through the campsite, as if at a summer camp, playing a game of tag.

It would appear that all their choices had been taken away, locked in a house with an armed teenaged boy pressed sullenly against every door.

The Islamist fighters - many of them lightly armed teenage boys, the officials said - were mowed down by transitional government soldiers backed by the Ethiopian Army, the most powerful military in the region.

The film opens with a queue of armed boys who have joined the Islamic Bassidj boarding a bus to take them to the battlefront of the Iran-Iraq War.