“... for the introduction of a new one. This whets the appetite, and the new one is always fascinating. Patrick, the family friend, a high-ranking civil servant who repairs harpsichords and who lives for moments of social tension – ‘Patrick sat, his patrician features minimally relaxed, enjoying the spectacle’ – is a ...”

“... read from the steps of the General Post Office in Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street) by Patrick Pearse gave full expression to these sentiments, adumbrating a series of principles that blended romantic nationalism with the political ideals of the Enlightenment. The Proclamation is one of the finest documents of its kind. ‘Irishmen and ...”

“... often can’t remember what they are majoring in; in American Psycho people keep getting the hero Patrick Bateman’s name slightly wrong; in Glamorama (1998) it’s only designer labels and celebrities that the characters are alert to. Many of the best scenes in Ellis’s novels take place at parties, because no one can ever really be at a party without ...”

“... a hard life these days for a naval historian. His readers, brought up on Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey, know all about the technicalities and the details of the service already. Stuffed with explanations of loggerheads and bitter ends, capable of laughing at jokes about dog-watches and sailing on a bowline, they will neither turn ...”

“... field rather than a serviceable set of working assumptions that enables critical commentary? In Patrick Parrinder’s account of this major change in contemporary culture, the theorist is seen as a presumptuous upstart who has forgotten his place. The traditional role of the critic is to act as middleman between author and reader – ‘making sense’ of ...”

“... Patrick Geary’s The Myth of Nations is more timely than he could have anticipated. ‘Historians have a duty to speak out,’ he writes, ‘even if they are certain to be ignored.’ Why such passion, such a sense of contemporary engagement, in a book about the very early Middle Ages? Since 1989, this period – between the third and eighth centuries – has been persistently misrepresented by Europe’s nationalist and racist politicians, who claim to find in the Middle Ages some kind of justification for their policies ...”

“... to have been built on a fairy-mound. Undaunted, they moved in, along with Bridget’s father, Patrick Boland, a landless labourer who must have taken pride in the improvement to his family’s fortunes. All that was lacking was a child to bless the happy union. The weather in March was bitter and Bridget fell ill. She had been on a visit to her father’s ...”

“... Before he became Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an academic and the author, with Nathan Glazer, of Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, published in 1963. Moynihan’s chief contribution was the chapter on the New York Irish, a lament which begins: ‘New York used to be an Irish city ...”

“... and told her a good deal about the sad family history. It may have been for these reasons that Patrick Brontë commissioned Gaskell to write his daughter’s biography, a task that could have been made to order for her. In the first volume she set her motherless heroine as a domestic, shy but compassionate feminine jewel set in a gothic Yorkshire. The ...”

“... Cheney, played by Christian Bale, whose other larger than life roles include Bruce Wayne, Patrick Bateman and Jesus, looms effectively in the film, as he should – nothing is quite so visible in a movie as a supposedly invisible man. Bale is terrific in the part but he is not the film’s hero. He is its plump, ever present ghost. The hero is Donald ...”

“... just the cat and housekeeper. During his visit to San Francisco he got on famously with my cat Patrick, who, like Roy, was not a cuddly creature. I have a picture of the two of them on the sofa, enjoying each other. This is Fisher’s poem ‘Syntax’: March. The cat with eyes askew rubs her great head hard against the last stalk of kale left standing in ...”

“... of Istanbul and the Bosphorus, and a postcard Croatia full of ravines and snow. The music, by Patrick Doyle, is smooth and romantic throughout, even when the soundtrack accompanies a murder in process. It signals entertainment rather than drama, an evening of contained movie crime and its resolution. There is a moral dilemma at the climax – not to be ...”

“... geography can be very much about chaps as well as about maps. In this instance, Alfred Weber and Patrick Geddes, Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus take to the stage. Furthermore, since the geographer as theorist must be complemented by the geographer as philosopher, it is suggested that there are lessons to be learned from that progenitor of the philosophy ...”

“... which is America in the 19th century. The movie’s first location is Oregon City, 1851. In Patrick DeWitt’s novel, on which the movie is based, the man offers a leaky vision of greatness that could be seen as an authoritarian rendering of Hauer’s Blade Runner memory: ‘A great man is one who can pinpoint a vacuity in the material world and inject ...”

“... the rights and wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to ...”