“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... should have come from another Catholic, Sir John Biggs-Davison, who observed that the snakes St Patrick is supposed to have banished from Ireland all went to the United States and became Irish-Americans. Perhaps he should be force-fed Emigrants and Exiles, * a powerful new study of the exodus to North America (both Catholic and Protestant). Kerby Miller’s ...”

“... There are also Pennington’s Hamlet, Gemma Jones’s Hermione, Sinead Cusack’s Portia, Patrick Stewart’s Shylock, Tony Church’s Polonius. Anyone interested in Shakespeare, the theatre or acting couldn’t fail to find this slim volume absorbing. You would have to be a greenroom nut or a stage-door Johnny to follow Antony Sher through every day ...”

“... cascade in the bottom left-hand corner. ‘It seemed such a marvellous place to have a rainbow!’ Patrick George, a considerable Rubenist, once said to me. But Lisa Vergara’s destination is the idyllic landscapes of the last years of his life – and they no longer show ‘phenomena’ in this sense. There are no catastrophes and no perils. Instead there is ...”

“... he did not commit; A Presumption of Innocence (1976) brought the Queen into action again to pardon Patrick Meehan for a murder he did not commit; Wicked beyond Belief (1980) was followed by the release of David Cooper and Michael McMahon, also detained for a murder they did not commit. Few readers of Mr Kennedy’s latest book will finish it thinking he has ...”

“... Borrow, who captivated Victorian readers with his tales of Spain and Wales. In our own time, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to the Balkans in the 1930s and Rory Stewart (and dog) walked through Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Macfarlane is a member of this group of walkers, with the extra strand that he knows he is ...”

“... from the US and twice from Canada.) He continued to get married. He constructed what the historian Patrick Collinson admired as a ‘magnificent library’ out of books he hadn’t paid for. He regularly plagiarised. He wrote a bad book (one academic disbelieved the rumour that it had been written by Peters’s fourth wife because ‘it would, I think, be much ...”

“... Tobacco to establish a Chair of International Relations named after BAT’s former chairman, Sir Patrick Sheehy. Though he is chiefly concerned with Britain, Monbiot sees what is happening here in a wider context, recognising that international ‘trade agreements have become the greatest threats to representative government.’ He describes how groups of ...”

“... In Padua, on 20 January 1976, a young girl called Margherita Magello was repeatedly stabbed and left for dead. She was discovered by Massimo Carlotto, a 19-year-old student radical and member of Lotta Continua, who tried to save her, and, in doing so, got covered in her blood. She died, he was arrested and, a pawn in the struggle between Lotta Continua and the police, was tried for her murder ...”

“... that Darling seems most alive. ‘When Darling entered a room, men stood,’ the playwright Robert Patrick said. ‘They instinctively stood in the presence of the goddess. Before she opened her mouth and started the Candy craziness, she projected a real movie star effect. Aristocratic. Ladylike.’ It would be naive to think that a woman who spent time at the ...”

“... army themselves. In January, a week before Legion opened, the head of the British army, General Patrick Sanders, made a widely reported speech at an armoured vehicles conference: ‘As the prewar generation we must … prepare,’ he said, ‘and that is a whole-of-nation undertaking … regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them.’ On a trip to ...”