“... the background to it. On the News reports of Tony Snowdon’s death. I first met him in 1968 when Patrick Garland brought him backstage with Princess Margaret after Forty Years On. A friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her ...”

“... when he was 18. It’s never been translated, but according to Simenon’s excellent biographer Patrick Marnham it’s a would-be humorous story about his home town, Liège, ‘partly set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons’. Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote 150 or so pulp books, mainly of ...”

“... than likely ways. Rose Macaulay collected soap and Storm Jameson socks and blankets for Spain; Patrick Hamilton deserted satirical realism for dystopia and allegory; Stephen Spender meandered Forward from Liberalism, crabwise; Sybil Thorndike joined the board of the Daily Worker; Dylan Thomas insisted that his ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ must first ...”

“... for my family and for my staff. No lawyer in Northern Ireland can forget what happened to Patrick Finucane ... the allegations of official collusion in his murder are particularly disturbing and can only be resolved by an independent inquiry into his murder, as has been recommended by the UN Special Rapporteur ... ‘Another reason why RUC officers ...”

“... of Ford’s collection mania (Lincoln’s Illinois courtroom, Thomas Edison’s lab, the homes of Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, Luther Burbank’s botanical lab, the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop and so on) and a lovingly replicated small Midwestern town complete with a town hall, blacksmith’s shop, schools, fire ...”

“... The collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers over the weekend of 13-14 September last year was an event of world-historical magnitude. What was so important about it wasn’t the local havoc it caused, the loss of jobs and livelihoods and savings; it wasn’t even the fact that the US Treasury’s decision to allow the bank to go bankrupt triggered a full-blown stock market collapse, the nauseatingly expensive bail-out of AIG just a few days later, the seizing up of credit markets, the near implosion of the global economy, and then a worldwide recession/ depression ...”

“... More than most, Max Weber’s reputation reflects the aspirations of others. His wife, Marianne, did much to establish it in Germany, rapidly turning his articles and drafts into books and writing a biography. Liberal émigrés were what one of his American editors, Günther Roth, describes as its shock troops in the English-speaking world. Marianne’s biography appeared in German in 1926, in English in 1975, and has been regarded as the most authoritative ...”

“... Elizabethans internalised and used to make sense of their world. Here the scholarship of Patrick Collinson, to which Lake’s Bad Queen Bess? is a critical response, was transformative, showing nothing less than a politics of emergency, with privy council and parliaments pressing to execute Mary Queen of Scots and mobilise loyal Protestant subjects ...”

“... on smells, and of course there is Proust’s madeleine in the related area of taste (as well as Patrick Süskind’s 1985 blockbuster Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), but it’s rare for a memoir or literary work to focus on smell. By chance, however, when I started Schlögel’s book I was in the middle of reading a memoir published fifteen years or so ...”

“... agencies: how far should they allow their informers to go in order to protect their secret role? Patrick Walker, the senior MI5 officer in Northern Ireland (later appointed head of the agency) drew up a report in 1980 instructing the RUC to place spying ahead of solving crimes. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which hears cases brought against the security ...”

“... The Glasgow art scene was ‘a notoriously tough, hard-drinking, back-biting milieu’, Patrick Elliott writes in the thoughtful study that accompanied this summer’s show of Eardley’s work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. It was a world not keen on artists born in England, or gay people. The Glasgow Art Club ‘did not admit women ...”

“... powers continued to enjoy over Africa. On Césaire’s death in 2008, the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau admitted that he ‘never understood why the author of these writings, which had liberated so many warriors in Africa, was not for the independence of Martinique’.Crucially, Césaire and Senghor started out as poets rather than ...”

“... and topographical sweep make the poem seem almost like a fragmented and extremely compacted Patrick White novel; and it is not always easy to follow. It is technically inventive, a quasi-cinematic exercise in sudden cross-cutting and the talented mimicry of a wide range of Australian voices and accents: but I find the rise and swell of Murray’s free ...”

“... Agreement takes up too much of his attention in the last chapter. So he hasn’t been able to tell Patrick’ anxious parents that the boy is now performing well, has had a much-improved term, and may yet turn out to be a decent scholar. That leaves the North. It is now 20 years since the People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry was attacked by ...”

“... as a sacrificial and redeeming act – his rhetoric from late in 1915 was increasingly that of Patrick Pearse. This is a dimension Morgan might have incorporated more tellingly into his analysis; again, the work of Newsinger could have been discussed. However, Morgan does bring out clearly the extent of Connolly’s pro-Germanism from 1914-16. Connolly in ...”