“... than she gave. She spent a week in a nursing-home because she’d been drinking too much; and told Patrick Leigh Fermor that Diana Cooper had rung her there ‘and said, “Hear you’re in a home for inebriates”: she then came along, seduced all and sundry and left after booking a bed to die in; my prestige much improved by the visitation.’ When in 1981 ...”

“... bullet in his chest, he lit a cigarette to deceive his men as to the seriousness of the wound. Patrick Shaw Stewart, who reminisced longingly of hot baths and starched shirts, wrote: ‘Every time I remember that nearly all my friends are dead I take some form of imaginary morphia, and promise myself work or love or letters, or fall back on the comfortable ...”

“... group’ of academics. This consisted of Lord Robbins, Sir Philip Morris, Sir Patrick Linstead and Sir Keith (now Lord) Murray, the UGC Assessor with the Committee. Like every other commentator Mr Carswell judges Morris, the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol, to have been the most powerful member of the group. His summary of Morris’s attitude ...”

“... and Jimmy [Goldsmith] from beyond the grave. I hope they are happy now.’ When Ingrams and Patrick Marnham wrote the story, after Elwes’s memorial service, they widened it considerably and turned it, in Ingrams’s words, into an ‘attack’. Lifting a line from my Sunday Times article that mistakenly reported Goldsmith at a lunch with the ‘Lucan ...”

“... entered his bedroom to discover him pacing up and down stark naked, dictating to his secretary, Patrick Kinna. Churchill said: ‘You see Mr President, I have nothing to hide from you.’ On learning in October 1944 that the future of King Zog of Albania was in serious doubt, Churchill sent a note to Eden: ‘Another King gone down the drain!’ A banquet ...”

“... bear an odd resemblance to popular naval romances of our own time, like those of C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian; for poetry in the 17th century was expected to cater for all a public’s literary appetites, and usually did so very well, whether it was war in Heaven or bombardment on the high seas. Sylvester’s version of the French poet Du Bartas is much ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... places like Kirkwall Cathedral on Orkney, Lough Derg (an Irish island shrine dedicated to St Patrick), and Glasney College in Cornwall, not quite a monastery or a church, but a ‘college’ (collegium) or gathering of clerics, and, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Mount Athos, the ancient and still active Eastern Orthodox monastery. Other places ...”

“... which looked at a close-knit working-class community against the backdrop of town planner Patrick Abercrombie’s scheme to clear slums and rehouse residents in ‘overspill’ estates in London’s outskirts (Poplar was intended to be emptied by two-thirds). Willmott and Young painted a sentimental portrait of working-class resilience rooted in ...”

“... of such portentousness. Indeed, some of its chapters could even profit from a dash of it, as (like Patrick Parrinder on science fiction) they mostly give us plot summaries along with the odd low-key critical comment. Wendy Lesser ends her hymn to Penelope Fitzgerald by teetering on the brink of throwing a Gwyneth Paltrow: ‘when I spoke about her in Los ...”

“... a crime so curiously violent that nothing could adequately explain it. So, in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman kills a girlfriend, apparently because she thought that his suit was designed by Henry Stuart rather than Giorgio Armani. This reduces murder to the merely satirical. A motive and an action are set up against each other in a way that says, without ...”

“... to lend themselves to this ‘human interest’ approach than they used to be. Three years ago, Patrick O’Brien, then director of the Institute of Historical Research, disparaged the whole genre of political biography. He argued that ‘just as there are scholars of the performing arts who prefer to contemplate actors rather than acting, players rather ...”

“... lack of personal documents, has talked at greater length to friends. One of them, David’s doctor Patrick Woodcock, points out that ‘in her way she knew herself to be a great comic figure.’ It would have helped if David’s biographers had shared that perception. After the failure of her last important love affair, David suffered a cerebral haemorrhage ...”