“... apparently completely satisfied for the moment’. Are cars really so sexually alluring? Patrick Keiller suggests a connection between conventional car design (engine at the front driving the rear wheels) and traditional masculinity or heterosexuality, on the one hand, and unconventional design and unconventional sexuality, on the other. Let’s ...”

“... had no such vision. They would be blamed for ‘losing’ China. One of the great merits of Patrick Tyler’s history of this relationship is its down-to-earthness. He footnotes Li Peng’s diatribe thus: It is likely that Li Peng invoked the ‘losing China’ argument because he understood how powerful it was in domestic American politics. After so ...”

“... accused me of letting my needle get stuck’ – mild, in all conscience, by comparison with Patrick Owens, who is remembered for calling him, a couple of years earlier, ‘a remorseless and fatuous nitpicker’. This is surely unfair: what evidence could there be to justify ...”

“... a writer at the other end of his career from Illis. Here, too, it concerns love and socialisation. Patrick White’s Three Uneasy Pieces uses, as did his previous work Memoirs of Many in One, but more concisely, a doubling and multiplication of personalities and grotesque flights of fancy to explore some seamy aspects of his own life and imagination. His ...”

“... a dual monarchy as a way of ending partition. Astonishingly, the notion had first been floated by Patrick Pearse himself: he had suggested inviting Prince Joachim, younger son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, to be King of Ireland. It is fascinating to think that German might now be one of Ireland’s official languages, along with English and Irish. How complicated are ...”

“... that is the minimal entry qualification for being considered ‘great’. In a memorialaddress, Patrick Blackett likened Florey’s achievement to that of Jenner, Pasteur and Lister: but the public were so little aware of him that when Macfarlane first approached publishers with the notion of a biography, they wondered if he would not do better to write on ...”

“... wrote a pamphlet demanding that the GLC become more of a ‘strategic authority for London’. Patrick Jenkin wrote in favour of the new Tory creation, and its expansion. Then, in 1981, Labour regained the GLC. It became clear at once that the new Labour administration intended to break completely with the traditional values of Labour in office. Its ...”

“... whereas Cavan and even Monaghan have a less decided orientation. I cannot, for example, think of Patrick Kavanagh as a Northern writer, any more than I would wish to allocate Peadar O’Donnell to the South.’ Donegal is part of the North, yes, but it’s also the place many Northerners go to escape from ‘Norn Ireland’, as we sometimes call ...”

“... at the Annual Party Conference. From now on there is less excuse for ignorance. Paul Whiteley, Patrick Seyd and Jeremy Richardson have conducted the first national survey of Conservative Party members, based on a sample of 34 constituency associations in various regions, including Scotland. Since the survey is based on a standardised questionnaire with few ...”

“... a microchip factory. In Ruth Berghaus’s Frankfurt Götterdämmerung, described in some detail by Patrick Carnegy, the murdered Siegfried ‘was not solemnly borne aloft but brutally kicked aside by Hagen’s men’. Not all of these images are stupid or anti-musical, but as a whole they are symptoms of a process that has invaded opera over the past thirty or ...”

“... Bundy, the national security adviser, went further, informing the ambassador in Washington, Patrick Dean, that ‘what the president particularly wanted from us was a military contribution in the form of men on the ground. Two platoons were suggested or even less or a military field hospital. Bundy said that the result of such a contribution would be ...”

“... controls the bleeding of one colour into another. Indeed, in the hands of artists from Turner to Patrick Heron (his gouache abstracts are quite as successful as oils in the same mode), this might seem to be the proper pleasure to take from the watercolour. The precise kind of watercolour drawing which depicted every crocket on a cathedral façade also had ...”

“... came across his own uncle’s name in a newspaper many years ago. The man in question was Private Patrick Downey, also of Limerick, who was shot the day after Boxing Day 1915, near Salonica. Officially he was 19, but he may well have lied about his age to get into the forces. He was shot for refusing to fall in for a fatigue and then to put on his hat. The ...”

“... panels and doorway are laid out at the bottom of the museum’s main stairs. On the wall nearby is Patrick Caulfield’s 1968 screenprint Found Objects. On a plain mauve ground, a feeble collection of archaeological finds is set out: a couple of potsherds, half a dozen pebbles, a few twigs and two white dots that might be lumps of chalk. The picture is a ...”

“... portraits of himself and Patricia Preece. Timothy Hyman’s catalogue essay (both his essay and Patrick Wright’s add a great deal to the exhibition’s success) is marked by an ability to sort out the seriously impressive and the absurd in Spencer’s work, without failing to see the absurdity of some of the seriousness and vice versa. He is surely right ...”