Due to the inability of units of the British First Army to link up with the Pont Du Fahs force, the 2nd Parachute Battalion was forced to retreat over fifty miles towards the nearest Allied units; it was attacked several times during the retreat, and although it reached Allied lines safely it had taken more than 250 casualties.
With the submarine a week or so from the nearest Allied port, in Australia, the skipper, Lt. Cmdr.
Ron Howard's plodding, pedestrian hagiography of troubled mathematician John Nash - who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia but went on to win the Nobel prize - is taken straight from Dryden's maxim about great wits being sure to madness near allied.
The novelist Jeanette Winterson has heard voices that she says put her "in the crazy category," and the idea has a long history: Plato's "mad poet," Aristotle's "melancholic genius," and John Dryden's dictum that "great wits are sure to madness near allied".
Earlier, in the 17th century, literary critic John Dryden wrote: "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide".
It cannot undo the deliberate deployment of haste so that our nearest allies had no opportunity to express disagreement.
"It is shocking that the United States take measures against their most important and nearest allies, comparable to measures taken in the past by the KGB, by the secret service of the Soviet Union".
In this passage, widely quoted by opponents of evolutionary theory, Darwin suggests that the break between "man and his nearest allies" will be widened through the extinction of the great apes, leaving a gap between the more civilised man "and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla".
It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.
Eventually the strain of serving in tropical waters told on the ships and all three were forced to undergo an extensive refit in the nearest available allied shipyards, which were located in the Spanish-held River Plate in South America.
In his interview with PBS, Obama said that it was in America's "core self-interest" to prevent chemical weapons being used in a volatile area, near allies such as Turkey and Israel.
