“... most notorious assassination – the ‘political murder’ of Wrong’s subtitle – was that of Patrick Karegeya, Kagame’s former childhood friend, comrade-in-arms and security chief. In 2006 Kagame had him jailed for ‘insubordination’ – his second stint in prison. On his release he fled to South Africa and formed an opposition party in exile. At ...”

“... policy in Northern Ireland. In January 1988, the then Attorney-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, told the Commons that, given certain ‘considerations of national security’, no charges would be brought against eight named RUC officers for various offences including conspiracy to murder, nor against certain MI5 officers involved in ...”

“... notice). The following day, part of the text of a pompous letter from the Solicitor-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, to Heseltine informing him that he had made a few trivial mistakes in a letter he had written on the Westlands business to Lloyds Bank, was mysteriously leaked to the newspapers. Two days later, on 8 January, Sir Raymond Lygo, chief executive of ...”

“... disqualifications. But the line of collusive solidarity held. Argentina was voted in as soon as White Russia and the Ukraine had been confirmed as suitable peace-loving states with autonomous foreign policies. The Latin American bloc provided two-fifths of the votes in the early General Assemblies, thus ensuring for the time being a permanent American ...”

“... as the third most common cause of death in them, after syphilis of the brain and tuberculosis. Patrick Manson, a classmate of Ogston’s at Aberdeen University and the first to prove that mosquito bites could spread disease, called it ‘the very fatal type of dysentery, euphemistically called “colitis”, which is the scourge and disgrace of lunatic ...”

“... with her: ballet of boughs sprung on the snow, moaning and glowing – your little ‘ohs’ – white-limbed doe, gracious, would I could know yet the gliding grace of all your days These lines are interesting, not as English poetry, but as an instance of Anglo-Italian disharmony. Take the repeated ‘o’ sounds which imply both Dowling’s charm – her ...”

“... version of it promulgated after 1918 by Raymond Unwin, most humane of metropolitan planners. Patrick Abercrombie, Unwin’s spiritual successor and author of the two famous plans for London issued in 1943-44, also did well, under harder circumstances and greater pressure. Sheppard is wrong to condemn London’s high-rise housing without also ...”

“... the get-rich-quick prosperity gospel of carnival barkers like Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White, leaves Catholicism as one of few options for the self-respecting Christian. The prominent reactionary stream of American Catholicism also nurtures anti-liberal and anti-democratic thinkers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian ...”

“... independence – he had no wife or children – but was very reliant on domestic help. ‘That dog Patrick is abroad and drinking,’ he complained in a letter, ‘and I can’t get my nightgown.’Grant is particularly interested in Swift’s pockets. ‘An idea of the contents,’ she writes, ‘can be deduced from his description of what Gulliver had in ...”

“... targeting data, often by paying huge sums of cash, from sources within rebel militias. A former White House adviser on Russian affairs told me that before 9/11 Putin ‘used to say to us: “We have the same nightmares about different places.” He was referring to his problems with the caliphate in Chechnya and our early issues with al-Qaida. These ...”

“... is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his biographer, describes the sinister shabbiness of this occasion, the nervous fascination of the audience laughing at a renegade Spanish priest reciting unfamiliar Latin words, the canny showmanship, the plastic buckets brimming with ...”

“... his first novel to its conclusion. The river was still, as though gathering to itself the white and orange beams of the street lamps which were reflected in its darkness . . . Spenser Spender was filled with a sensation of lightness, as though his own body were moving out, too, across the water, implicated in the lives of these human beings who ...”

“... necessary’ and an attempt to prove that all ‘black’ people were naturally inferior to the ‘white race’.*It is ironic, therefore, that Long is our main source about Francis Williams, who in his lifetime (he died in 1762) had been the most famous Black person in the world, at least among educated English-speaking people. He was rich; he was a ...”

“... disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in 1907, so too James Joyce managed to kill his father when in ...”

“... her character’s name from the Silkies of Northumberland: female spirits ‘dressed in rustling white silk’. They were known for helping around the house, like the generally male and better-known Brownies, a species, Briggs says, of ‘household hobgoblins’: ‘little rough, hairy men who are to be found all over the Lowlands of Scotland, the North and ...”