“... are counterproductive and useless. If you ask whether American imperial policy or British or French foreign policy is in any way responsible, you’re attacked. But of course the intelligence agencies and security services know perfectly well that the reason for people going crazy – and it is a form of craziness – is that they are driven not by ...”

“... empire. To be sure, it was very different from the overseas ‘possessions’ of the British and French and also from the other great contiguous empires of the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks. Even so, Evelyn Waugh’s famous observation, cited here by Daniel Moynihan, applies to them all: ‘the foundations of empire are often occasions of woe; their ...”

“... left, though their influence survived in various transformations – for example, the work of Patrick Geddes. Positivists were supposed to be active in public affairs, and Harrison had strong opinions on practically everything. Though a keen patriot, he thought India should be returned to the Indians, and Gibraltar to Spain. Still under thirty, he wrote ...”

“... were asleep, were the two most high-profile runners in the history of the force, John Townsend and Patrick Macmanus. When, a day or so later, Hardy’s colleague John Thelwall was tapped on the shoulder and led off to prison, another well-known runner, Thomas Carpmeal, was one of the arresting party. However respectable the runners seemed to loyalists, to ...”

“... dream lasts an hour in the dream an hour passed.’ The early books are often compared to French cinema. The blurb writer for A Serial Biography says that Raworth’s prose has ‘more in common with isolated sequences of a Godard movie than a novel’. Godard’s movies, of course, were novels: chapters, quotations, drama, romance. Cinema, back ...”

“... into workplace productivity. But sibling rivalry was also at work. In 1925 her brother, Patrick Blackett, had become the first person deliberately to transmute one element into another, by firing alpha particles into nitrogen atoms in a laboratory in Cambridge. (He was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.) Milner’s research was arguably just ...”

“... in Place’s day did have some virtually and actually criminal members (such as ‘Jew’ King and Patrick Duffin), and some exceptionally dissolute ones (such as ‘Dr’ Watson, Thomas Preston and Thistlewood). Place probably knew that Spence’s social vision included working-class ‘feasts of hospitality and love’ complete with ‘cheering ...”

“... stream of almost research-free popular Lives and would-be popular Lives (a genre ably parodied by Patrick Barlow’s Shakespeare: The Truth, or, From Glover to Genius, 1993), as well as important work on particular phases or aspects of the Bard’s life by Honigmann, Stanley Wells and others, but Shakespeare: A Life can make some claim to be the first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lloyd-Jones did most of the work and most of the perceptive selection of speakers, who ranged from Patrick Heron to Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly to Robyn Denny, David Hockney to Rasheed Araeen. The highlights included Lisa Tickner’s brilliant dismemberment of Reg Butler’s defence of his question: ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing ...”

“... the title of the really rather famous book by Cawdrey published 14 years before Blount was born. Patrick Joyce conceals some valuable material on dialect behind a smokescreen of class prejudice and rather poor writing; a not untypical example: ‘around the mid-19th century when dialect emerged’. Daniel Rosenberg on Home Tooke makes interesting connections ...”

“... another pupil, Bobby Romanes. ‘They had real pistols and real powder,’ according to a witness, Patrick Campbell, ‘but no real bullets – not even a charge of redcurrant jelly to add to the apparent tragedy of the encounter. No doubt Stevenson enjoyed this mimic warfare.’ The response of their teacher, D’Arcy Thompson, is not recorded, but probably ...”

“... disco. Jones and Kantonen write about musicians and producers – from Giorgio Moroder to Patrick Adams – as well as influential record labels (like Casablanca and Salsoul) and clubs. Early in the book the authors make an effort to distance themselves from Abba and the Bee Gees (a strategy recommended to all serious advocates of disco) – those ...”

“... London, Rupert took Paris, his mother having found him a nice family with whom he could learn French. His host was ‘very Chirac, a bull of a man with dyed black hair and big murderer’s hands. I could imagine Madame’ – the man’s wife – ‘dropping her coat on the floor and walking obediently to the bedroom, nude on her heels, as Monsieur ...”

“... as members of the customs union and the single market?Free trade zealots such as the economist Patrick Minford are happy to say in public that they wouldn’t mind seeing large parts of the British agriculture and automotive industries disappear so long as there was a net increase in national wealth. This is not, I think, what voters in Sunderland and ...”