“... Nora is joined briefly by a man called Glencoe as they sing from the doom-laden ‘Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’, which begins in ‘Dunferline toun’ – like St Andrews, in Fife – and chronicles the loss of a ship and its crew on the North Sea, while bringing a Norwegian princess to marry the Scottish king. In the version transcribed by Walter ...”

“... on a loop. Incidentally, a worn pair of slippers also features in another chapter – they quote Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of tracking down the yellow baboosh that are said to have been Byron’s. The clincher: one of them bears the impress of a misshapen foot. And what to make of the ‘painstakingly assembled reconstruction’ of Dylan Thomas’s ...”

“... pregnant Irish possibilities as sectarian violence, Franco-Irish relations, the heroic figure of Patrick Sarsfield, and an act of treachery which would almost have satisfied Joyce. If the subject itself did some of the work for him, however, this is not to depreciate his acumen in discovering it or the delicacy of his manipulation of it into a poem-sequence ...”

“... he decided that the French inquisitorial system was superior. He took up the complex case of Patrick Meehan, gaoled on a murder charge in Scotland and eventually freed with £50,000 compensation, after a direct written approach from Meehan’s wife and later from the prisoner himself; and his interest in the Luton Post Office murder was stirred when a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was loping alongside, identifying characters in Annan’s story – Reith, Sandy Lindsay, Patrick Geddes – but reading them from a different angle. ‘You look at Europe from the other end,’ says the Assistant Commissioner to Mr Vladimir in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Something similar goes for the Scots, particularly now that the Commissioner is ...”

“... Miami hero is North himself. It is no accident that when White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan wanted to defend him he went to Miami to do so. Appearing before a Cuban audience, he excoriated critics of the covert aid to the Contras as traitors. There is today no other city in America in which Buchanan could have made such a speech and ...”

“... that by the 1990s a number of historians (myself included) had embraced an oxymoron coined by Patrick Collinson to describe the England which witnessed the revolution: a ‘monarchical republic’. While the English were most certainly monarchical subjects, in terms of their political liberties, roles and expectations, they also perceived themselves to be ...”

“... much Irish thought is idealist in tendency, all the way from Eriugena and Berkeley to Yeats and Patrick Pearse. The real world is not the dingy, strife-torn island you see, but a higher spiritual or imaginative domain. The Irish Dissenter John Toland fellow-travelled with pantheism, while Robert Clayton, a colleague of Berkeley, was convinced that Nature ...”

“... by the government’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, and its chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, you saw a man struggling with his every instinct. For decades a mischievous smirk, a joke here, a hair-ruffle there, have been enough to make newspaper editors, interviewers, Have I Got News for You audiences and cabinet colleagues putty in his ...”

“... unlike now, was short of first-class lawyers. Cripps’s elevation had at least two precedents. Patrick Hastings, one of the outstanding barristers of the time, became a Labour MP and Attorney-General in the first Labour Government. W.A. Jowitt, Attorney-General in the second Labour Government, had actually been elected as a Liberal MP when offered the post ...”

“... the French army surgeon Charles-Louis-Alphonse Laveran; a role for the mosquito was suggested by Patrick Manson’s studies, in China, of another mosquito-borne disease, elephantiasis; and Ronald Ross, a British army surgeon, first demonstrated the presence of the parasites in the stomach wall of mosquitoes that had fed on malarial patients. Later (working ...”