“... boxing match.) He also disliked the other top scientists already on the committee, Patrick Blackett and A.V. Hill, who disliked him in return. The atmosphere got so bad that, after little more than a year, Blackett and Hill resigned and Tizard said he, too, would resign unless Lindemann were removed. The committee did some good ...”

“... Escape from Alcatraz (1979), in which Clint Eastwood played Morris and the warden was the late Patrick McGoohan, so famous himself as ‘The Prisoner’. There was a rich irony in the casting of McGoohan, for wardens and the society they are paid to defend are as much prisoners of the idea of incarceration as the inmates. Are we remotely within reach of a ...”

“... of his downfall, but it is immortalised in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in which Sejanus (a young Patrick Stewart in the BBC adaption) is presented by his successor, Macro, with the letter ordering his summary execution and the butchery of all his family. After seven years at the apex of power, Macro was driven to suicide by Tiberius’ young ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... further undermines the victim. George Cukor’s 1944 film noir Gaslight, based on the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, inspired the term, though it took some time to gain ground. Psychoanalytical scholarship first mentioned ‘the gaslight phenomenon’ in the late 1960s. In 1981, two doctors, Victor Calef and Edward Weinshel, gave an account of gaslighting in ...”

“... claim for unschooled painting (Janis wrote a catalogue essay for Masters of Popular Painting on Patrick J. Sullivan, an American house painter turned artist he described as ‘gentle’ and ‘unspoiled’). Masters of Popular Painting was the third exhibition to survey the major movements of modern art at MoMA; the first, Cubism and Abstract Art, was held ...”

“... in more old-fashioned terms. ‘He talks of his books as if they were written by someone else,’ Patrick Bowles, the first translator of Molloy, noted while Beckett retouched his handiwork in 1953. ‘He said that it was the voice to which he listened, the voice one should listen to. “There are many things I don’t understand in my books.”’ Bowles ...”

“... at the mercy of the Hot Hand, mere surfers on the inexorable waves of chance like everyone else? Patrick Barclay’s portrait of José Mourinho, with its subtitle ‘Anatomy of a Winner’, promises an answer to these questions. But in fact it simply confirms how little thought even the best football writers are willing to give to the workings of chance in ...”

“... wasn’t in the intellectual league of Cambridge’s Ernest Rutherford or Manchester’s Patrick Blackett or London’s J.D. Bernal, but he had certain virtues that made him ideal for the position of Churchill’s personal scientist. He was posh, rich, well mannered, well connected and Tory – and that wasn’t typical of the British scientific ...”

“... known as Máméan (the Pass of the Birds) that pilgrims still use on the way to the well of St Patrick. Individual graves are built up with large stones, for the length of the body beneath, and there are no crosses to be seen. The bodies of infants were buried by a father or an uncle, often at night. The scant ritual and the isolation of the setting is ...”

“... by more than a few readers with a special interest in him or his times? Raymond Williams advised Patrick Parrinder against reading the novels in the winter, as ‘a tactful and tolerant supervisor solicitous about my emotional health’, as Parrinder puts it. Scandal and an absolutely efflorescent unhappiness are to be found beneath the evasiveness, the ...”

“... because working families too were receiving welfare.’ Though some liberals, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, derided such sweeping assertions, Murray’s thesis appealed both to common sense and to prejudice. It justified cuts in welfare spending and reductions in taxes and in state intervention. It also presented a pragmatic, morally neutral case for ...”

“... conference in Durban on the economic impact of Aids, Jonathan Broomberg, Malcolm Steinberg and Patrick Masobe constructed a complex actuarial model to take into account the fact that the epidemic’s doubling time is likely to slow down as it progresses. In the very early stages the number of adults aged 15-34 who are HIV+ doubles every six months – a ...”

“... his own would probably have been a flimsy and meagre affair. The Pruntys had come a long way since Patrick left the bogside cottage in county Down, and – astonishingly – reached Cambridge as a sizar to take his degree for the Church. ‘No one from Ballynaskeagh had ever gone to Oxford or Cambridge,’ observes Frank, ‘and to the present day no one has ...”

“... obscura. Gray probably stole this contraption from the Edinburgh Outlook Tower of his hero Sir Patrick Geddes, the pioneer sociologist and town-planner. He uses it to create an image not of engagement but of alienation; the Institute’s élite is literally predatory on losers deemed to have lost all human qualities. Yet if ‘all history is intellectual ...”