“... was revealed by Doppler radar observation in 1965 and made ruthlessly public – it’s even in Patrick Moore’s 1967 edition of The Observer’s Book of Astronomy. XTL was published as a hardback in 2001. Did nobody notice? It’s not a typo and Goodwin and Gribbin both have a PhD in astronomy. Whatever the reason, the error inevitably casts something of ...”

“... best (or worst) of them combined the secrecy of Whitehall with the languor of Fitzrovia. It was Patrick Hamilton in conversation with George Smiley down a blind alley off Rathbone Place, with froth sliding down the insides of pint tumblers and lipsticked fags in every ashtray. Men such as Gamlin practically lived in Langham Place: their outer bounds ...”

“... are considerable. Bush’s plan is a total rejection of the sensible proposals of the Baker-Hamilton report, which recommended talks with Iran and Syria. He means instead to escalate and widen the war. ‘Shia extremists backed by Iran’, Bush said, were now an enemy as significant as al-Qaida. His demonisation of Iran – the hidden hand controlling ...”

“... the gardens made by artists: Ivon Hitchens’s six acres on Lavington Common near Petworth, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills, the garden Patrick Heron had in Cornwall and the garden Derek Jarman made on a shingle bank at Dungeness. Each makes different use of plants in landscape. Finlay’s ...”

“... instilled or imposed. Jefferson’s loyalties extended no further than Virginia, while Alexander Hamilton, the one true nationalist who had no local allegiances, realised that the principle of propinquity meant that an overarching sense of national solidarity was beyond the reach of the new republic. A half-century after the Framers had made that ...”

“... glass allowed her to make images that looked like collage, a form then very much in vogue: Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi had shown at the Whitechapel in 1956, incorporating pictures of movie stars, images of food packaging, snippets of consumer advertising. Boty made collages without support or encouragement from a tutor: one from 1959 shows a ...”

“... in 1750, and is still continuing. An early collector of Pompeian antiquities was Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to the Court of Naples in the 1770s, whose frequent observations of the crater of the volcano were communicated to the Royal Society. Bulwer-Lytton stayed in Naples long enough to write his hugely popular romance The Last Days of Pompeii ...”

“... its two chief characters, who mainly share the narration, are continuations of the late-Fifties Patrick and Jenny from Take a girl like you, thus giving the story its own recessive and wistful casting-back posture. In addition, though a light and easy and genuinely funny book, Difficulties with girls has a good deal of commerce with violence, darkness and ...”

“... the only full-length novel devoted to olfaction originates, like A Rebours, in an alien culture. Patrick Süskind’s Perfume was translated from the original German and published in Britain and America in 1986. The novel (originally put out in hardback by Hamish Hamilton) neatly partners Corbin’s The Foul and the ...”

“... a determination to bring down Sturgeon.Three inquiries were set up into the Salmond affair. James Hamilton, a former director of public prosecutions in Ireland, has been investigating the possibility that Sturgeon breached the ministerial code, while Laura Dunlop’s review of the harassment complaints procedure has just reported (she recommended that, in ...”

“... values I’ve lived for now count for nothing.’ Although Vaughan and Minton shared a house in Hamilton Terrace for six years and came from similar middle-class backgrounds, they irritated each other. Vaughan could both envy and despise Minton; he was the small brown bird and Minton the parakeet. In his journals (often written when drunk at the end of the ...”

“... to leave it out in their art.’ Critical debate was lively and healthily factionalised, with Patrick Heron upholding a formalist approach in opposition to John Berger’s advocacy of realism. Berger not only promoted figurative realists at every opportunity in his pieces for the New Statesman, but was also involved with the three Looking Forward ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... milieu which nourished this remarkable writer. For instance, Bold mentions that MacDiarmid knew Patrick Geddes, the Edinburgh polymath and pioneer of modern town planning. But no attention is paid to MacDiarmid’s own suggestion that Geddes’s literary magazine the Evergreen inspired the Scottish Chapbook. In the 1890s Geddes had espoused a Scots ...”

“... from Westminster and returned to Scotland by a young nationalist writer and singer called Ian Hamilton. Another opportunity arose not long afterwards, when the Post Office announced that the logogram EIIR would in future appear on all postboxes. Henderson was at a meeting held in Sorley MacLean’s flat to discuss how Scotland might respond. He and Bobby ...”