“... before the war had even started, America could have tried harder to win the war of words. General Patrick Cordingley, former commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade (the Desert Rats), has said that during the first Gulf War reporting was often extraordinarily erroneous. So far in this war it has been obvious to close observers and unsurprising to everyone that ...”

“... have been, or just possibly was, eighty in 2014. The second child and eldest son of George Charles Patrick (‘Pat’) Bingham, the sixth earl, and his wife, Kaitlin, much was made in 1974 of his ancestry, in particular the life and character of his great-great-grandfather, the third earl. In addition to treating his Irish tenants at the time of the Famine ...”

“... else. This was already evident in the 1890s, in the life-style of another Peter Hall hero, Patrick Geddes, founding father of what is termed the anarchist strain of planning thought. Putting theory into practice, Geddes moved into a flat in one of Edinburgh’s poorest and filthiest tenements, determined to show how it could be cleaned up and redeemed ...”

“... this story whole to acknowledge that it affords an important insight, which is also present in Patrick Joyce’s explanation of social stability in mid-Victorian Lancashire. The growth of trade unions in the cotton industry, Joyce maintains, helped institutionalise class feeling in a way that was compatible with the prevailing ethos of ‘industrial ...”

“... but the present Workplace Relations Minister, Peter Reith, was amazingly unembarrassed by the way Patrick Stevedores abruptly kicked 1400 union members off their Melbourne dock one January midnight and replaced them with non-unionists. In the ensuing war the Maritime Union of Australia, nobody’s favourite union, won public support beyond its dreams; the ...”

“... Robert Brasillach pointed out in 1943 that it was an ideal setting for detective stories, and Patrick Marnham’s gripping book is a detective story of sorts. It recounts the life of a man who was, in himself, particularly opaque. Jean Moulin was ambitious and devious. He exploited every possible political connection to advance his career and by 1937 he ...”

“... disappeared. Late in the afternoon police came to St Mary’s, looking for the Rev. Father Patrick McRory. He was a young priest, well known and liked among the parish; he was often to be seen in and out of the houses in the Calton, especially those in Abercrombie Street. The officers went to number 74 and arrested ...”

“... I was writing a novel called Downriver and walking, in dialogue, with the cultural historian Patrick Wright, who lived close to me in Hackney. We explored the territory together: the Bow Quarter development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet ...”

“... for the unfortunate living and the thickly particulated Lada air they breathe are not. The planner Patrick Abercrombie wrote confidently that ‘modernist design sprang into being after the gap of the war.’This improbable leap – architecture is a slow business – was countered by the sounder opinion of Paul Fussell: ‘It is a mistake to think that the ...”

“... evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German feeling; and Mrs Edwina Currie (‘most of the egg production in this country is, sadly, now infected with salmonella’). Then there is the long line of ...”

“... strict requirements contrast strongly with the sweeping rhetoric of the rest of the convention. As Patrick O’Keefe has shown, this formulation was insisted on by the US delegation, which refused to sign unless it was drafted to their satisfaction. None of this is mentioned by Cuno. In any case, the real significance of the Unesco convention is that it shows ...”

“... into a bin-bag: the bound copies of Mayfair, the battered Rolex Oyster Perpetual, the copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree, and the Beretta .25 with the skeleton grip which had been rusting beneath Bond’s mattress during all those rounds of chemo. Bit of a lady’s weapon, thought the young man. Can’t think why he hung onto ...”

“... on the other.Gauguin and Van Gogh have roles to play too, but Riopelle and his fellow curator Patrick Noon also chase some distractingly tenuous connections. Courbet, Monet and Signac don’t sit well with an artistic forebear who kept issues of observable fact so low on his agenda. Why exhibit the banal Frédéric Bazille rather than Adolphe ...”

“... If Galtieri’s junta had prepared for war in 1982, even to the minimal extent of equipping Argentinian fighter-bombers properly, Mrs Thatcher’s Enterprise of the Falklands would almost certainly have failed, thereby ensuring that Argentina would still today be ruled by a triumphalist military élite, inept mismanagers of a decaying economy, impotent spectators of the country’s social disintegration, and of course both cruel and corrupt ...”

“... Glancing through the list of 131 named MI6 officers, past and present, who are ‘exposed’ in the first of these books, I noticed with mild interest that I was slightly acquainted with the wife of one of them, a certain Hubert O’Bryan Tear. The next time we met, I mentioned this fact and she laughed merrily. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows that – at least since he retired ...”