“... should be linked only with vocal numbers. I was after something that bit classier. My producer, Patrick Garland, suggested filming poems, gave me The Less Deceived, and I read ‘I remember, I remember’. I think I had realised by then that to write one doesn’t need credentials, but I must be the only one of his readers who came to Larkin as an ...”

“... of The Triflers was written in the 1920s as a possible ‘come-back’ for the aging star, Mrs Patrick Campbell. It now had only three acts, butler and footmen had been replaced by the telephone, and the ducal conservatory had become a streamlined modern interior belonging to a young man called the Honourable ‘Daisy’ Vane. ‘Decorations by ...”

“... seen to encapsulate, or express, a nation drunk on its own mythology and self-satisfaction; or, as Patrick McGuinness memorably put it in the LRB of 3 January, one ‘high on its own supply’. We have been told that Britain – for which read England, for which read English people and English politicians (though two of the worst offenders, Michael Gove and ...”

“... dazzling light. The narratives that Greenblatt looks at are mainly versions of the story of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, situated plausibly enough in the middle of Lough Derg in deepest Ulster, whose penitential horrors might be substituted for purgation after death. Thence to ghosts. By the 15th century the average ghost was a soul in Purgatory (I think they ...”

“... a doorstopper collaboration between 122 historians published by Le Seuil in 2017 and edited by Patrick Boucheron, a specialist in medieval Italy who teaches at the Collège de France. Its publication was controversial, but the concept was exciting. The short essays each dealt with a significant year in French history, often from an unexpected angle. Many ...”

“... same table. During the course of the next week, I was to make several similar errors. Names like Patrick White and A.D. Hope were greeted with candid derision, and nobody had heard of Clive James.* When, at one of the actual Festival’s talk-ins, I said that it was odd to find Peter Porter missing from various standard anthologies of Australian verse, I was ...”

“... of this survived independence, it gradually gave way to the plainer, more disenchanted idiom of Patrick Kavanagh, or the self-parodic minimalism of Samuel Beckett, so fearful of writing Hiberno-English that he ceased to write in English altogether. Colm Tóibín’s austere, monkish prose, in which everything is exactly itself and redolent of nothing ...”

“... are appointed.Starmer has given jobs to several well-known individuals from outside Parliament. Patrick Vallance, the new minister for science, appeared regularly on the televised coronavirus updates. Jacqui Smith, the new minister for higher education, became the first female home secretary in 2007, but has not been a member of Parliament since 2010. James ...”

“... In 1987, BT’s phone box monopoly ended. So began the conversion memorably described by Patrick Wright in A Journey through Ruins (1991), of the only remaining ‘public’ element of a now otherwise privately owned service into a (privately owned) heritage industry. Boxes began to come in different shapes and sizes. Respectable neighbourhoods could ...”

“... found its fulfilment in the presidency of Jack, but originated in the mind of his father. Joseph Patrick Kennedy was born in the Irish enclave of East Boston in 1888, the first child of Mary Augusta Hickey, the daughter of a successful builder, and Patrick Joseph Kennedy, a Democratic party official with a series of ...”

“... have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally succinct, is much more substantial. Renshaw is a specialist in American economic and labour history, and, as might be expected, his book has most to say about domestic policy: the whole of Roosevelt’s foreign policy ...”

“... of’ and ‘vow of revenge taken by Cheeta’. However, those expecting a contemporary version of Patrick Dennis and Cris Alexander’s fabulous spoof, Little Me (1961), the life of Belle Poitrine, will be disappointed. Poitrine’s memoir is pure absurdity, but gives a more accurate insight into the tone of the period. It helped perhaps that she was a ...”

“... in both directions). Also on board the Volunteer, under Captain Arthur Brownlee’s command, is Patrick Sumner, the ship’s surgeon, recently returned from India – he was at the Siege of Delhi – and now discharged, not altogether honourably, from the army. He is looking forward to an ‘easeful’ time on the Volunteer ‘after the madness of ...”

“... of a young boy: the wonder of childhood is there as well as paternal abuse. St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels are anchored in the narrator’s early experience of rape by his father, but formally the books are comedies of manners and the drama plays out in parties, drug binges, vacations. There’s a lot of child rape – at the hands of ...”

“... Holroyd and many other intelligence officers knew they were there. When a young Catholic, Patrick Duffy, was ritualistically murdered by a Protestant gang, Holroyd knew who had done it. He told the RUC and they appeared to agree. Eventually, to Holroyd’s astonishment, two quite different men were arrested and sent to prison. They are still ...”