“... is anything but. Pamela Harriman gives a welcome-to-Washington party in Georgetown, which features wall-to-wall lobbyists and power-brokers of the most traditional stripe. Campaign contributors are received and rewarded in proportion to the timeliness, and the size, of their subscriptions. The first harvest of cabinet ...”

“... in his films is ‘in reality an effect of memory’. The same observation might be made of Patrick Modiano, whose noirish investigations of wartime Paris, spun from newspaper clippings and phone listings, often recall Melville’s cinema. Their work converges, too, in a shared feeling for Nazi-occupied Paris, their fascination with the underworlds of ...”

“... feeding off the power. At one point, our hero (George, not Bill) takes a fancy to Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze’s costar in Dirty Dancing, and he gets his people to sound out her people about whether she fancies a date. Yes she does! He goes to gatherings of Greek-Americans and they crowd round wanting to know when he is going to lift the curse of Dukakis ...”

“... used to hide under an old yew tree. One of his cousins described him putting his ear against the wall that divided the garden from the graveyard, declaring that ‘the spirits of the departed’ were speaking to him. For a writer who was to become such a sage of childhood – and who throughout his life, and afterlife, would be described as childish and ...”

“... of intense fruit,’ combining ‘finesse and elegance with near-beefy depth’), or with the Wall Street Journal on the same type of wine (‘Moving towards the serious side, a bit hard. Not only is this wine blue-tinged, but it tastes blue-tinged, almost like roasted lilacs’). I appreciate that ‘almost’, since I haven’t a clue what roasted ...”

“... woodshed’ by her bosses, according to a Newsday report, and her career at NBC was finished. A Wall Street Journal reporter sent a personal email describing the terrible situation in Iraq: her editors pulled her out of the country and off the story. The notion of a balance between freedom and security mistakenly assumes that its benefits and burdens will ...”

“... to bed, and the doorbell rang. Twelve policemen burst into the house and pinned Robert to the wall. Now he’s in prison, but I don’t know where. What shall I do?’ Rupert Everett, it is clear, has no respect for the living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth ...”

“... invented names whose pay is collected by officers or bureaucrats. I heard Staff Sergeant Craig Patrick, who was training Iraqi troops, say: ‘It’s all about perception, to convince the American public that everything is going as planned and we’re right on schedule to be out of here. I mean, they can bullshit the American people, but they can’t ...”

“... reports. Among the documents, a detective inspector discovered something of interest in Patrick Armstrong’s ‘personal file’: a set of typed notes containing many handwritten amendments. In their amended form, the typed notes were an almost word-for-word match with manuscript notes of three interviews with Armstrong on 4, 5 and 6 December ...”

“... that I would present myself in the hospital the following Sunday afternoon. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh has a poem called ‘The Hospital’, which begins: ‘A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward/Of a chest hospital.’ This did not happen to me, but it was surprising how quickly the routines of the hospital became comforting and ...”

“... circle of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his memoir, Patrick White remembers de Maistre as ‘a snob’ who ‘enjoyed a princess’:In Eccleston Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper ...”

“... Washington, but he also came to think of Ireland as belonging to a ‘world system’ centred on Wall Street and the Pentagon. This transatlantic outlook was a product of the Cold War but it still has explanatory power. Joe Cleary has updated this paradigm in an excellent pair of books – Modernism, Empire, World Literature and The Irish Expatriate Novel in ...”

“... It’s high up. The first church I went to in Bellaghy was just a pulpit sticking out of a wall.MILLER: It is high up. Halfway up to heaven.Seamus climbed up to the pulpit. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘why hast thou forsaken me?’ The trees seemed to have something to say at the window. The countryside was pressing in again. Someone’s spectacles sat on ...”

“... part of his or her creative process. One of the Creativity Explored artists I collect is John Patrick Mckenzie, whose images are from one angle repetitive in the extreme. Mckenzie takes any surface he can – often white foam core – and prints streams of words across it using a black Sharpie pen. He has his own idiosyncratic, instantly recognisable ...”

“... of Burns. In this respect and others, Burns is like a peasant poet of modern times, the Irishman Patrick Kavanagh, who spent many hard and lonely years as a farmer, and of whom Seamus Heaney, another Irish poet with close ties to the world of the countryside, has written: ‘he wrested his idiom bare-handed out of a literary nowhere.’ ‘I am ...”