“... When the black slaves of Montserrat planned a rebellion in 1768, the date they chose was St Patrick’s Day, because they thought the plantation owners would be partying. Deane’s sympathy with Mitchel’s struggle against the British leads him to balance with care but not to obscure Mitchel’s role in ...”

“... San Francisco artist Jimmy Miles, incline to a dry, coolly minimalist practice, in which white space is not only tolerated, but an essential, if seriously off-kilter aesthetic feature in its own right: I’m not sure what to call Miles’s austere and evacuated style. Some kind of Blakean radical simplicity? A borderline personality’s childlike ...”

“... up the beck. Not a rare bird, the heron’s size is never less than spectacular, and grey and white though they are they still seem exotic. Bitterly cold with snow forecast later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written Rock, a quarry by the river at Brampton with an inscription carved by the legion that ...”

“... when he entered King’s School, Canterbury (alma mater of Christopher Marlowe, Somerset Maugham, Patrick Leigh-Fermor), from which Brooke ran away in the first week. He was sent back. The second week he ran away again. The second withdrawal marked the termination of his residence there, which had lasted less than a fortnight. Brooke’s parents – whom he ...”

“... of the Universe often end up with their trainers, and Julia was going out with hers, a man called Patrick. I was fascinated by these powerful women. Instead of being the escorts of presidents, they ended up marrying their hairdressers. They were the fairy princesses trapped inside ivory towers. They only met co-stars and staff. Like Madonna, Julia smelt ...”

“... of the life of the mind, its comforts and delineations. The cat, female and probably white, is the secret sensuality of the ascetic life; not in the monastery garden, or out in the bog, but sitting in its proper, bounded place. Or the mat is Ireland itself, if this is not too much of a stretch, in the age of saints and scholars, that ...”

“... bear no trace of explosives. A second suitcase, opened by a Scottish farmer, contained packets of white powder which a local police officer told him was undoubtedly heroin; no heroin was ever recorded as having been discovered. All but two of the labels that Dr Fieldhouse attached to the bodies he found were removed and have never been found. Although the ...”

“... Can we imagine either sentiment being expressed at Heathrow airport? The poet and novelist Patrick McGuinness, in his forthcoming book Other People’s Countries (itself a rich analysis of home and homelessness; McGuinness is half-Irish and half-Belgian) quotes Simenon, who was asked why he didn’t change his nationality, ‘the way successful ...”

“... him about it. He worked in Rhodesia in the 1970s as a young soil scientist preventing earth on white-owned farms being washed away by the rain. He became fond of the country, then run by Ian Smith’s white minority government in defiance of the rest of the world, including its former colonial master, Britain, and ...”

“... upon the jury in its other roles and functions. The transplant operation was done in the White Paper ‘Criminal Justice’, Command Paper 9658. This commended the ‘powerful analysis’ of the Roskill Committee, and extended its recommendation that the defence’s right of peremptory challenge should be abolished in fraud trials to all jury ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... projects by Colquhoun and Miller, one in Camden and another in Hackney, where an icy, high-style white-walled modernism, derived from the work of Adolf Loos and Giuseppe Terragni, somehow morphs into the typology of the London Victorian semi, for a clientele of Camden and Hackney council tenants. Today, NW1’s role has largely been supplanted by E1, and the ...”

“... that the Italian historians who did not go into exile were all good anti-Fascists at heart. Patrick Salmon rescues the Nuremberg judges and dents the tu quoque Nazi apologists by showing that although the British were intending to invade Norway and had already violated its neutrality at the time when the German invasion got under way, the German ...”

“... A coincidence: I wrote the first page of ‘It’ on St Patrick’s Day with Irish pipers tuning up down in the street 12 floors beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush and my bones frozen to the marrow ...”