“... owed much, he reckons, to the shrewd instinct of Pakenham to be rid of a professional candidate, Patrick Gordon-Walker, who would inherit favourable boundary changes to come, and stick in a single-issue, one-off candidate to keep that improving seat warm for himself. Such Renaissance thinking among the godly is fun. The tactic, he hints, was followed again ...”

“... revenge, striking him down, with Murdochian violence, when he contemplated the attractions of Mrs Patrick Campbell. He had flirted with other actresses, but did not carry the pursuit to its end; with Stella, his first Liza, he committed himself, but this pursuit also failed and she slipped from his grasp. Despite his theoretical contempt for ...”

“... that lessons be taken from some ravings in Isaiah and the Book of Revelations. My brother Patrick read the parable of the sower instead. Its lesson of prudent husbandry was spelled out in Watsonville. Was it fate or carpentry that had stricken some houses and spared others? Watsonville is a Third World town, like West Oakland low on the news agenda as ...”

“... to the 12th. The first chapter is an account of the historical background, written with panache by Patrick Wormald; the second an equally readable summary by Helmut Gneuss of the Old English language. ‘Beowulf’, the earliest epic poem in the English language, has a chapter to itself. Old English poetic metre and technique, the tenth-century refinement of ...”

“... belief that there is a gulf between rational and moral thinking. He follows Fitzjames Stephen and Patrick Devlin in equating disgust or aversion to a practice with its being immoral. He thinks that morality, so defined, must be respected even when it runs counter to economic analysis. We then end up with a society regulated partly by economic reason and ...”

“... must be another of nature’s old con tricks. Another writer McGahern brings to mind is the poet Patrick Kavanagh. McGahern’s story ‘Bank Holiday’, despite its curious but endearing earnestness (‘I find myself falling increasingly into an unattractive puzzlement,’ the chief character says, ‘mulling over that old, useless chestnut What is ...”

“... of the Labour Party in the post-war years. One has only to think of Dick Crossman, Tony Crosland, Patrick Gordon-Walker and, of course, Hugh Gaitskell. This, coupled with his hatred of lefties like Nye Bevan, who he believed to be splitting the Labour Party, drove him simultaneously to be a ferocious witch-hunter on behalf of the right, and to the bottle. Mr ...”

“... peace with himself’. Another major topic in the present Letters is his love-affair with Mrs Patrick Campbell in 1912-13, and here his style strikes me as less effective. The clowning in his letters is funny enough – only Shaw could have written to his romantic beloved: ‘You turned a cold cheek to me, and, with a most wonderful pursing of your lips ...”

“... illustrious and exclusive it may be, unless, of course, it is the Garter, the Thistle, or the Patrick. A foreign aristocrat’s attitude to Orders and decorations would tend to be the opposite: he would regard something like the OBE as beneath his dignity, even though it represented much hard work on his part; while coveting an Order which denoted no ...”

“... Soane favoured and in which his annotations flow most freely. In Sicily he and his friends used Patrick Brydone’s Tour through Sicily and Malta, testing the learned author on every point with mischievous good humour. The tempo of these excursions was fairly brisk and Soane’s companions were not of the kind to tolerate delay occasioned by sketching and ...”

“... provides two small examples of the point. One, an essay on the Glaswegian criminologist, Patrick Colquhoun, rescues a man of importance from near-oblivion and his ideas from misrepresentation. It will not be surprising if it leads to a burgeoning of scholarly interest in his opinions and their influence: for the moment it enriches our understanding ...”

“... discovered Flann O’Brien in the late 1970s, background information could not easily be found. In Patrick Power’s excellent translation I read The Poor Mouth (An Béal Bocht) with enjoyment but without suspecting that it was intended as a parody of a whole sub-genre of Gaelic misery memoirs. I read The Best of Myles through a fog of cheerful ignorance about ...”

“... a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous.’ (This celebrity-as-talisman gag is a mild version of Patrick Bateman’s exegesis of the work of Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis and the News and Phil Collins-era Genesis in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.) The book is set roughly twenty years ago, which just qualifies it as historical fiction, but it isn’t ...”

“... has come under scrutiny recently and doubts have been raised about the validity of his findings in Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado. A report on the argument in the New York Times suggests that anthropology has become the academic equivalent of The Jerry Springer Show. In any case, objectivity and ideological agendas aside, anthropologists are ...”

“... now pays a high price if he gets involved with the disreputable face of science. Magnus Pyke and Patrick Moore stay very close to the professional end of this division; Desmond Morris seems to be crossing over; and from Nigel Calder’s evidence the most recent effort by Fred Hoyle seems destined to be seen in the same way. Why? After all, as Calder ...”