“... Supernatural or mystical elements in her books are typically associated with impostors like Patrick Seton in The Bachelors or Tom Wells in Robinson or Hector Bartlett in A Far Cry from Kensington. But for Alice Thomas Ellis faith is something nebulous and magical, it is God rather than man who moves in mysterious ways, and it’s all too easy to take ...”

“... as to be almost parodically fashionable, the perfect type of those Euro-best-sellers such as Patrick Susskind’s Perfume and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose that seem, to some British critics, to spring from an EEC conspiracy to thwart exports of genuine, wholesome, straightforward British fiction the same way French farmers block the entry of English ...”

“... is meaningless to describe them both as expressions of urban society. Class, too, is atomised in Patrick Joyce’s chapter on work. Labour historians have long assumed that 19th-century industry was a field of conflict between workers and employers in which the employers held the whip hand. Joyce turns this conception almost upside down. In his view, the ...”

“... dish. Moral or not? Legal or not? Playing God? Her existence was made possible by the work of Patrick Steptoe, a North Country obstetrician, and Bob Edwards, a Cambridge physiologist. In his 1983 Horizon Lecture on BBC Television, Edwards described their search for moral guidelines: We have looked for inspiration to ...”

“... with irrepressible Mitford brio. There’s a high-spirited acknowledgment of help received from Patrick Leigh-Fermor (easily the best of her correspondents) in removing from her MS such campus jargon as ‘on-going’, ‘explicate’ and ‘comedic scenarios’. I only wish he had cut out ‘long-remembered’ and ‘sadly missed’. What’s odd is how ...”

“... Fenian rhetoric, is equally significant. His contact with the fierce US Fenian organisation, with Patrick Ford of the Irish World and above all with John Devoy, precipitated him into the ‘new departure’. Prison had probably prepared his mind to grasp the land issue; though many readers will be surprised by the clarity with which it emerges that Davitt did ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... To vanish from sight; be traceable no farther; cease to be present; be lost, especially without explanation.’ The verb in question normally behaves intransitively, but in Argentina after 1976 it learned to take a direct object as the military regime disappeared between nine and twenty thousand people. Humberto Costantini and Omar Rivabella both write about this, but their approach is so different that their books in fact complement each other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... forces. Soleimani’s assassination has turned Iranian anger back towards the Great Satan. As Patrick Cockburn explains (in the next piece in this issue), Iran’s leaders were astounded by the millions of mourners who turned out in the streets. Thanks to Trump, a regime that had become increasingly estranged from its own people saw extra­ordinary scenes ...”

“... a women’s section, while on the other side of the argument, Caroline Neill, whose husband, Patrick Neill, was the chair of the Bar Council, turned the top floor of their Chelsea home into an anti-EEC think tank. Inside the Labour Party women played a formidable role on both sides of the debate, Castle and Judith Hart for the socialist antis, Shirley ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had been ‘illegally procured’ – by fraud, say. In practice, according to the historian Patrick Weil, it was ‘quite discretionary’, and invariably ‘highly political’ and ‘symbolic’. In 1940 and 1952, the discretionary power was formalised by provisions permitting denaturalisation for people who had voted in a foreign election, worked for ...”