“... Ali’s days are numbered. ‘One day, he will wake up and discover he’s out of business,’ David Lamm, chief of staff of US forces in Afghanistan, said in a press interview. But when I went to find Hazrat Ali, he was busy meeting US forces to plan election security. It is thanks to relationships like these that one can easily imagine the poppy economy ...”

“... military commanders have been as heavy-handed as Bremer and the CPA in Baghdad. In Mosul, General David Petraeus, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, has been far more careful not to alienate the Sunni establishment in the city, which was a main recruiting ground for the Iraqi army (there are 1100 generals in Mosul because Saddam often paid off ...”

“... when Percy was the most successful tragedy of the time, and her closest friends were the actor David Garrick and his wife, Eva, was the cause of some dismay to sober-minded Evangelicals. But Roberts had an answer to that. He was not offering ‘a perfect specimen of Christianity’, but an account of a heroic triumph: More had mixed with the society ...”

“... that. More important, the computer itself is changing at blurring speed. As a character puts it in David Lodge’s new novel: ‘Computer chips are getting smaller and smaller and more and more powerful all the time. They’re improving faster than any machine in history. It’s been calculated that if cars had developed at the same rate as computers over the ...”

“... that turned up in the 1950s, but eventually joined in and had a huge success with Richardson in David Storey’s Home, described by Lindsay Anderson, who directed it, as ‘one of those uniquely happy, harmonious and fulfilling theatre experiences that happen, if one is lucky, once in a lifetime … Gielgud’s moments of pure, exposed emotion are ...”

“... escaped from a prison camp and joined a band of Italian partisans during the Second World War. David Storm Rice, an expert on Islamic metalwork, had an affair with Clara Malraux, fought as a commando in Ethiopia and, after a distinguished career as an art historian, suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Robin Zaehner carried out dangerous ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... were mere material for mockery. Amis quotes in his autobiography a truly hilarious parody of Lord David Cecil’s lecturing manner, admitting that he borrowed it from John Wain. I remember Wain ‘doing’ J.B. Leishman and F.W. Bateson, both of whom he respected, in a similar way. Such were the amusements of the Movement before its members became ...”

“... time to prepare for [the black migration] is now,’ one unusually far-sighted policy-maker, David Cohn, wrote in 1947. ‘But since we as a nation rarely act until catastrophe is upon us, it is likely we shall muddle along until it is too late.’ By the late 1960s the catastrophe had happened. ‘Repeated visits to Hunt’s Point in the South ...”

“... travel. It is the internal passport, an instrument of state control like the identity cards that David Blunkett is planning for us. Until 2002 it recorded not only your name, age and address, but your ‘nationality’ as well. Our word ‘Russian’ does duty for two distinct adjectives, rossiski and russki. The Russian Federation, like the Russian Academy ...”

“... World War One; but numbers are used differently now. ‘If you put as much money in as we are,’ David Nash, the retired admiral who heads the rebuilding effort in Iraq, remarked, ‘you can’t help but make a difference.’ Nash, a former top executive with the US construction firm Parsons Brinckerhoff, is in charge of an enormous logistical ballet. On one ...”

“... liberty’. Faced with the verdict that Summerhill was ‘not providing an adequate education’, David Blunkett threatened to shut the school down unless it gave up its philosophy of freedom. After a protracted and costly legal battle, Summerhill held onto its ideological commitment to voluntary lessons – an Independent Schools Tribunal overturned the ...”

“... rusting in the weeds, but a few days later we read that the car that belonged to their leader, David Koresh, has been auctioned for $37,500. No word on who gets those big bucks. In the university town of Austin, Texas we begin to see bumper stickers again. They flaunt their hipness: ‘Keep Austin Weird’ is a motto you see on T-shirts and bags, and ...”

“... to corral. The empire keeps producing idealised images of fixed order, as the fine work of David Quint and Philip Hardie has demonstrated, yet this order is always being disrupted and challenged by the movement of history. Virgil acknowledges at many turns the fact that the imperialist, like the man in the first simile in the Georgics, will be swept ...”

“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”