“... Erotica are the non-books of the bibliographical world. In most, if not all, of the standard records of book production and book possession their existence has gone unnoticed. They have seldom been recorded in the lists of books entered for copyright at the British Library or the Library of Congress, for the understandable reason that their secret publishers did not wish to bring them to any form of official attention ...”

“... different, of course, on the other side of the theoretical divide. In his comments on the Budget, Patrick Minford, the most determined monetarist around, argues that the Government’s financial and monetary policy is absolutely right. Yet in justifying these comments, and in his discussion of the nature of unemployment, Minford leads us onto the more ...”

“... British and Irish governments. The peace process was on the verge of unravelling. An embarrassed Patrick Mayhew, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, announced that the British were only negotiating with the IRA because of McGuinness’s ‘conflict is over’ message. An indignant McGuinness denied responsibility; nobody in Ireland ‘with a titter ...”

“... bicycle tour of France has something of all of these about it. Like Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space (1997), which pursues the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by nuclear power stations and motorways, Robb covers French ...”

“... pinned up in his studio, sway and dart across the painting, like shoals of little fish, or as Patrick Heron put it in another watery simile, ‘like a piece of largescale fishnet drawn over the surface of the canvas’. Bonnard is loved by many painters, and by writers who paint, and there has been much excellent writing on him (Timothy Hyman’s Bonnard ...”

“... was revealed by Doppler radar observation in 1965 and made ruthlessly public – it’s even in Patrick Moore’s 1967 edition of The Observer’s Book of Astronomy. XTL was published as a hardback in 2001. Did nobody notice? It’s not a typo and Goodwin and Gribbin both have a PhD in astronomy. Whatever the reason, the error inevitably casts something of ...”

“... whether better alternative structures were possible. After all, the urban consequences of what Patrick Geddes christened the ‘neotechnic’ age were international in effect. Did German, Italian or American cities, with their constitutional guarantees, stronger civic elites but consequent rigidities, do better or worse in the face of the 20th-century ...”

“... its ‘geotechnic’ successor (in which technology would enhance society and the environment). Patrick Geddes had predicted this in the 1890s, along with self-government. Which is why Geddes – a recurrent presence in the novels of Alasdair Gray – counts as a patron of devolution, and indeed of that peaceable civic Europe in which Gray’s ‘Scottish ...”

“... shape British social history over the last four decades: Ross McKibbin, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. I should say before I go any further that I too am a modern British historian: this is my subject and my tribe. I’ve met the dedicatees, most of the editors and a majority of the contributors to these volumes; a few are good friends. But for ...”

“... on the co-operation of her councillors and citizens echoes the influential thesis of the late Patrick Collinson. Walsingham’s status as a critical part of the ‘Heath Robinson machine’ of Tudor government – attested by the politician and historian Sir Robert Naunton, who described him as the ‘engine’ of the state – is well established. But ...”

“... was born, and Branwell, the feckless, drunken, stage-Irish brother whose first name was actually Patrick, was once burned in effigy by the plain people of Haworth with a potato in his hand.* The Brontës may have tried to become plus anglais que les anglais, in a long tradition of literary emigration to these shores, but their neighbours weren’t ...”

“... been dominated by nationalism, the most poetic of all political currents. It is hard to imagine Patrick Pearse chairing a finance committee. The former prime minister Garret FitzGerald, a writer and intellectual as well as a politician, is said to have remarked of a certain policy proposal: ‘That’s all right in practice, but will it work in ...”

“... particularly prone to re-create their own lives.’ Among recently exposed fantasists, he lists Patrick O’Brian, Bruce Chatwin, Laurie Lee and Jeffrey Archer, all writers for whom a legend as man of action was a large part of their stock in trade. The South African poet Roy Campbell, who was a world-class liar, influenced Van der Post at an impressionable ...”

“... allowances for himself; he valued circumspection more than abstinence. He admired the journalist Patrick O’Donovan, at the time an officer in the Irish Guards, who ‘while he stood at the salute of the King and Queen in the Victory Parade, the upper part of his body out of his tank, his soldier servant was fellating him below.’ But he distinguished ...”

“... In September 1848, Louis-Napoleon returned from his long exile in London armed with a startling blueprint for what he was later to call his ‘plan for the embellishment of Paris’. It consisted of a colour-coded roll of parchment representing the soon-to-be Emperor’s provisional thoughts on the renovation of the capital’s thoroughfares. This was the Urtext of the drastic transformations to the material and social fabric of Paris that were to take place during most of the Second Empire (the term ‘transformation’ was used for the first time in connection with city-planning during this period ...”