What a relief!" Or how, upon overhearing a group of German children at the Pegasus bridge museum casting doubt on whether he could have been wearing the helmet with the bullethole in it and still lived to tell the tale, he took the helmet out of the display case, put it on and used a pen to match the hole to the scar on his scalp.
(Max Stafford-Clark, who directed its debut at the Royal Court, recalls overhearing a man in the audience describe it as "Just a bunch of drunken women chattering").Ms Churchill's nearly three dozen plays are rarely tethered to a time or place, though they often resonate with contemporary anxieties.
There is a reason why Larkin, normally so particular in his use of words, deemed them unworthy for publication.Instead, his finest poems remain his best-loved: ones about his mother overhearing him playing blues records on the gramophone, or of feeling, once a guest has left, "the instantaneous grief of being alone".
Keep anguished and angry phone calls until after bedtime; children hate overhearing them.
He has even taken to loitering around the House of Commons in the hope of overhearing a stray rumour.
Its trick is to persuade the reader that he is overhearing the author think, and to join in.
Sujay Chohan, in Mumbai, formerly with Gartner, a consultancy, describes overhearing an exasperated Texan in cowboy boots at an American airport trying to book theatre tickets on his mobile phone, through a call-centre in India that thought he wanted a hotel room.
After overhearing two children saying Sega's video games are "uncool" and raving about the PlayStation from Sony, Sega's deadly rival, Mr Yukawa gets drunk in a bar and is beaten up.
PATRICIA ENGEL has an eye for the details of youth: the way 12-year-old boys can get obsessed with nunchucks, for example, or the shame of overhearing a parent speak casually about sex.
Over the past decade or so, and behind closed doors, the politicians now at the summit of the Conservative Party have expressed an ardour for Tony Blair, their three-time electoral slayer, that might shock anyone overhearing it.
Irrational Man (2015), an existentially comic thriller set in a New England university town, featured Joaquin Phoenix as a disillusioned and dissipated philosophy professor who decides to kill a family court judge after overhearing that he is likely to award parental custody rights to an undeserving father.
