“... tremendously. David West quite rightly begins the introduction to his translation of the Odes with Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wonderful story, in A Time of Gifts, of himself and General Kreipe reciting the Soracte ode while gazing up at Mount Ida, during the general’s removal from Crete after his capture. Kreipe’s eventual ‘ach so, Herr ...”

“... predestinarians’ and ‘credal predestinarians’) are those whom we used to call Calvinists. Patrick Collinson in his admirable Archbishop Grindal† recently reminded us that Beza was ‘a Calvinist in a sense that Calvin himself never was’. We still usefully employ the word ‘Marxist’, even though Marx himself denied being one. But the substance ...”

“... It’s only a few years ago since Mr Callaghan started presenting Labour as the British National Party. Labour, we were given to understand, was the party of patriotic unity, of social cohesion, of organic harmony between interests and classes. The Tories, on the other hand, were supposed to be ‘divisive’. It was they who were setting bewildered sections of the loyal yeomanry against each other, inciting the banker against the worker tearing apart the seamless, woad-dyed robe of Ancient British tribal solidarity ...”

“... an entirely new road system, based on an inner ring road, at that point a novelty in the UK. Patrick Abercrombie, then Britain’s most energetic town planner, drew up the 1946 Clyde Valley Regional Plan, which like his earlier scheme for Greater London envisioned that slum-dwellers would be moved out of the city into new towns, and the new low-density ...”

“... as John Walter’s man Finey used to say, pocketing the guineas, ‘Give me a few more, and by St Patrick I will knock out the brains of anyone in our office who dares ever whisper your name.’ Much of the book is pretty familiar material – Russell, de Blowitz, all the familiar heroes – but it is good that there is a whole chapter about Flora Shaw, who ...”

“... But until different minds, like that of Patrick Geddes, had had their say in the early decades of this century, projecting the city as a living thing, with its own identifiable but subtle relationships, the city was no real challenge to the intellect. Classical economics, the leading social science ...”

“... Romulus using handmade shot cut from lead bars. In Wales the welcome varied. Crewmen of the St Patrick packet, wrecked off Anglesey with the loss of 28 passengers, reached shore only to be robbed by copper miners. In open boars, sooner or later, the problem was ‘Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink’. Ropes were chewed to extract residual ...”

“... Trust, Figures in a Landscape (1988), which discusses Williams-Ellis’s vision, or perhaps Patrick Wright’s A Journey through Ruins (1991), which quotes Gaze quoting Williams-Ellis, or perhaps one of the countless other books and articles which sketch in the details of the imaginary Island. In any case, Barnes has his sources. England, England is a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as much as, if not more than, their Parliamentary salaries. Former ministers seem to do the best. Patrick Nicholls, the argumentative MP for Teignbridge, who had to resign his junior ministerial office when he was found a little over the limit in his motor-car, declares two Parliamentary consultancies worth £25,000, one ordinary consultancy, and four ...”

“... lines which caused Mark Boxer to be sent down from Cambridge. Well-matched to their subjects are Patrick Leigh Fermor on Lawrence Durrell (‘He put new oxygen into the air; nothing seemed impossible’) and James Lees-Milne on the last of the Sitwell gang of three (who else but Sir Sacheverell has ever been made freeman of Lima?) Swimming against the ...”

“... deprived of each other, as Irish life would have it. He imagines Claus von Stauffenberg talking to Patrick Pearse, the language barrier overcome by the strength of their beliefs: ‘They were not afraid to lose.’ Jack should not fear losing either, although he does, the attrition of idealism catching up with him. But reluctantly, though in the end ...”

“... only out of respect for the Yeats Family’s feelings’. He enclosed an office memo: Dr William Patrick Griffin, who is a Harley Street physician and whose home tel. no. is Putney 3551, says that he has definite proof that when the body of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats was brought home from abroad in 1948 and buried with great ceremony in Sligo, the coffin ...”

“... that ‘if there was an idealist among the men concerned in this insurrection’ it was Patrick Pearse, ‘and if there was any person in the world less fitted to head an insurrection it was he also’ (odd to say he was less suited to the job than himself, but one sees the point). In time, however, they came to see the event as having great ...”

“... land drawn around London with seeming foresight in the 1930s. Because of such planners as Patrick Abercrombie and Raymond Unwin, who believed the countryside was virtuous and cities should be contained, Londoners like me can still relish and appropriate scenes that New Yorkers, Angelenos and even Parisians, Romans and Milanese must go further to ...”