“... Patton were allowed to pursue different – and inharmonious – operational plans. It is by no means as clear as Hamilton suggests that Monty’s own proposals for victory in Sicily provided the best answer – some would argue the exact reverse. What is evident, however, is that Alexander did not attempt to provide any answer at all. Monty’s strictures ...”

“... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...”

“... of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d be sick. Whose United Kingdom? Theirs. The Eton Mess and their cronies. Big Business. Neocons. The warmongers. Not ours. We left Edinburgh at ...”

“... the enviable trick Of barely needing to chat up the chick – From Warren Beatty back to ruddy David. But why the broads latch on to the one bloke Remains what it has always been, a riddle. Byron though famous was both fat and broke While Casanova was a standing joke, His wig awry, forever on the fiddle. Mozart made Juan warble but so what? In Don Giovanni ...”

“... Factory: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (Simon and Schuster, £12.99), David Plotz investigates the Repository for Germinal Choice that was founded in California in 1980 by Robert Graham, an ‘eccentric millionaire’, and closed in 1999. The only prize-winner to fess up to having donated was William Shockley, who invented the ...”

“... Wills MP has merely been asked to ‘help generate a proper discussion about what being British means in 2001’. Whenever ‘Britishness’, ‘Englishness’ or any other ‘ness’ is to be summed up, you can be sure the clichés will come jogging along close behind. Sure enough, Wills talks of ‘a sense of fair play’, ‘tolerance’ and ...”

“... have a relationship extending beyond their weekly group therapy. The youngest of the trio, David Mummery, was born in 1939 – an ominous year for London. He is a writer, obsessed with ‘the London under London’. In 1964, he began researching the city’s ‘lost’ tube lines and stations whose maps exist only in Masonic libraries. Mummery has ...”

“... 24 per cent (Ireland). The most thoughtful discussion of poverty is found in the piece on Italy by David Moss and Ernesta Rogers. In the end, all one can conclude with any degree of assurance from this book is that there are still many poor people in Europe – a ‘Fourth World’, as they are called in France, which requires attention. But this is simply not ...”

“... essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation. It is, in fact, a virtuoso performance that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and his third book, Infinite Jest, may well be ...”

“... for the foreseeable future: ‘America wants to discourage those powers from developing the means to protect that resource for themselves.’ Much of US power is built on the back of the most profitable protection racket in modern history. The developed Asian economies are heavily reliant on Persian Gulf oil and Qatari natural gas. Three-quarters of ...”

“... ask a completely random question like: were you breast-fed? Not – as you can see – that random means innocuous. Come at me at a bad time with that question and I will cry and cry. Lynn Barber has been interviewing famous people in British newspapers for more than thirty years. Her questions are inquisitive and extrovert, bold and clever. The ensuing ...”

“... the realities of science in all their complexity. ‘Armchair’ philosophers of science such as David Lewis and David Armstrong, while holding to the claim that laws are spatially and temporally exceptionless, have tended to agree with Mitchell that even the most basic laws of physics are ‘contingent’. Roughly ...”

“... of reach for those who need it most urgently, but cannot pay for a lawyer. He and his successors (David Gauke is the fourth justice secretary in three years) failed to resist the cuts that by 2020 will have reduced the Ministry of Justice’s budget by 40 per cent in a decade, and have already caused it to lose many of its senior and most competent civil ...”

“... size.) In this same semi-sacral register, there are also beams with little crosses and stars of David cut out by metalworkers for families and friends of the dead. Most evocative of the fallen buildings are the fragments of the 360-foot antenna that once stood on top of the north tower, and most telling of the heroic response are the battered vehicles of ...”

“... A recent Italian book on the films of David Lean is called Colour and Dust, and with an amplification or two the phrase offers a pretty good description of his later work. The colour is mainly orange, and a lot of the dust is sand, especially in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). More generally, of course, the phrase evokes the director of swirling epics, a sort of Cecil B ...”