THERE’S A FAMOUS exchange in Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo in which Andrea says: “Unhappy the land that has no heroes”, and Galileo replies: “No, unhappy the land that needs heroes”. Britain was once full of people who thought like Andrea. The Empire was won by heroes — Wolfe, Clive, Nelson, Wellington, Gordon — and hero-worship was the imperial religion. Their fatal flaws were discreetly whitewashed by faithful hagiographers. The national myth, the tribal psyche, demanded no less.

But today? In normal circumstances, most of us are Galileos. We distrust people who “indulge” in heroics. We feel much more comfortable with scepticism. Indeed, we hardly talk of heroes at all. Instead, we point our children at the example of those bland, blameless, competent creatures called “role-models”.

In normal times, that’s right. A peaceful, prosperous, well-run society has no need of heroics. The boy would not be standing on the burning deck if the fire extinguishers had worked properly. Heroes are not born; they are made by adversity. “Show me a hero,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “and I will write you a tragedy.”

When the deck is burning, however — or when diplomacy has failed, and young men are instructed to kill each other for a faraway strategy of which they know nothing — what then is a true hero? I can think of at least three, totally different, sorts of courage. One is the moment of insane, magnificent recklessness: the soldier who charges the enemy machine-gun; the passer-by who intervenes in a knife brawl. Then there’s the heroism displayed by those who face certain death or terrible suffering with selfless grace and inspirational dignity.

But neither recklessness nor stoicism is what I would seek in a leader at a time of maximum danger. Heroic leadership is something quite different. It is, in many ways, anti-heroic. It is about minimising risk, knowing when to pull back, spurning the path of glory that leads but to the grave. It is about realism, rather than delusions of grandeur. And it’s about tempering steely determination with humanity and humility — because if there is such a thing as a just war, those are its twin pillars.

Most of all, though, it is about establishing a bond of trust with those who follow you that will not be shattered by disaster nor soured by disillusionment. The supreme example of that? Some would say Churchill’s leadership through the Blitz. I would pick Shackleton’s on his 1914 Antarctic expedition, because when he set off on his epic 17-day open-boat voyage to South Georgia, leaving his crew stranded and shivering on a barren rock, he made them believe implicitly that he would return and rescue them. And when he did exactly that, he said the finest words that any leader could utter at the end of such an ordeal: “Not a life lost, and we have been through Hell.”

Even in the heat of battle, true heroes never forget that life is the most precious thing we have.

RICHARD MORRISON

Why my hereos have nothing to do with Hollywood

I GREW UP in the West of America, where cowboys do indeed ride the range. The heroes of my youth may have been American legend (Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson), but there were also the great explorers Lewis and Clark. For me the story of the pioneers remains incredible, a naive and brave quest for a better and freer life. The iconic hero of my youth was the Marlboro Man, who stared out from billboards, a lone figure on a horse against a panoramic sky. When the Marlboro Man got cancer, I should have known heroes were doomed. And with Vietnam, Watergate and Martin Luther King, so it turned out to be.

In my early twenties I was working in upstate New York and was sent out to interview a woman. There was a big Polish community there and the article was something to do with Polish food. While talking to her, I noticed a number on her arm. It was her concentration camp number. She did not see her story as the stuff of Hollywood because it was only the stuff of her life. It was then that I began to understand that there are heroes and then there are Hollywood heroes, and they have little in common. When I think of heroes now, I think mostly of ordinary people. I am amazed by how many people have had their lives ripped apart by tragedy and yet emerge without guile or bitterness. A few years ago I interviewed a man in Oklahoma with the wonderful name of Opio Toure, a state legislator. He had always been against the death penalty but, he said, the test really came when first his father was murdered and then his little brother too, in a drive-by shooting. He understood the rage and the hurt, but that didn’t mean he had to have the revenge.

To be an everyday hero, you have to stay true to yourself while putting yourself last. Today there will be many acts of heroism in Iraq.We will not hear of most and those that make it to Hollywood will be distorted. But who could last as an international hero today? The cowboys are all gone — and no, George W doesn’t qualify — and most of the range as well. On an international scale, for me, there is probably only Nelson Mandela, a man who should have exploded with hate and yet forged another path that made the world see that sometimes the impossible can happen.

ANN TRENEMAN