“... 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 ...”

“... campaign five years ago, the equanimity (if not relish) with which Brexiter economists such as Patrick Minford contemplated the possibility that Brexit might mean the disappearance of British agriculture and the British motor industry was regarded with horror.Not any more. Farming is now regarded as politically expendable, even by the Conservative ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the stairs,’ which seems somehow different when a man quotes it. He tells the story of Mrs Patrick Campbell looking at a couple embracing, and turning to a streetwalker to say: ‘Another great profession ruined by Amateurs.’ The amateurs in film, according to Mamet, are the so-called professionals, the producers and writers and directors who ...”

“... but unconvincing effort at rehabilitation, His Royal Highness Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, and Earl of Sussex, was the prototypical marginal royal. If the essential qualification for worldly fame and posthumous glory is the possession of a large number of close relatives with crowns, he had it in ...”

“... the good life. One is reminded of another distinguished Afrikaner liberal, this time a Liberal, Patrick van Rensburg, who more than a generation ago enraged his fellow South Africans by saying that in the first years of black rule the whites who remained would have to accept a life as disadvantaged as the lives their new rulers had for centuries suffered at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... performance in that election was the response of his main adversary, the sitting Labour MP, Patrick Gordon-Walker. Gordon-Walker had led Labour’s Parliamentary opposition to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962, the first ever legislative restriction on the right of entry into Britain of some 600 million citizens of the Commonwealth. He and his ...”

“... book has been around ever since Australian writing started taking itself seriously, at least since Patrick White announced his intention to ‘people the great Australian emptiness’ with his works. The writer’s fear seems to be that in and for themselves these places and these people lack interest – that only an ungainly effort of the will can turn this ...”