“... Kings in the Broadway musical, Shuffle along. In 1922 he had gone to England to appear in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s production of Voodoo. There is something diagnostic in those titles, ‘Voodoo’, ‘Taboo’. They sound like perfumes, expressing as they do the same white exotic fantasies of primeval passion. Robeson couldn’t help it if his stage ...”

“... of learning from the patient’ – a line of thought which has in recent years been extended by Patrick Casement. The supporters of Anna Freud, men and women alike, were less impressive. The most vitriolic diatribes come from Melitta Schmideberg and her husband Walter. Melitta, in particular, repeatedly exacerbates tensions by comparing her Kleinian ...”

“... of the Abbey and Radio Eireann. The other was the marginalised pub culture of Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, in which writers accepted their isolation and took refuge in drink, dark satire and glorious bouts of excoriation. O’Faolain was too much an intellectual rebel to embrace the former course, too much a personal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he sees pilgrims performing ritual progresses on bare knees round and round the cairns on Croagh-Patrick, with priests urging on the blood-dripping laggards. Yet he believes it is the threat of the weekly Confessional that keeps pretty Irish girls so ‘highly moral’. An indefatigable and cheerful reporter, he visits gaols, asylums and poorhouses and finds ...”

“... for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more likely to think of themselves as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... His choice was inspired: he decided to send Mr Justice Devlin to the Old Bailey for that session. Patrick Devlin had been an outstanding practitioner at the commercial Bar, his manner about as remote as it could be from the fashionable knock-about jury practice of Melford Stevenson, or the political world of Manningham-Buller. Devlin had been appointed to the ...”

“... Simone de Beauvoir had to change her original title for When things of the spirit come first, because it had been unexpectedly pre-empted by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The new title which she picked (Quand prime le spirituel) was a simple variant of the other (Primauté du Spirituel), and the difference has in any case become insignificant in the English translation ...”

“... turn down Yeats’s volume, evade his peremptory rhetoric. Seamus Heaney has disclosed that it was Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry that showed him what might still be done: though I think it must also have indicated the limits of that achievement. Flann O’Brien had to rid his mind of Joyce before he could do his proper work: the riddance is At ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after the 2005 elections. The handover was postponed for a year, then another, then a third. Patrick Mazimhaka, the deputy chairperson of the AU, himself a Rwandese, promised the octagonal building would be kept. For 40 years, the OAU ignored the challenge posed by its accidental location. Not once did it note, let alone condemn, the transgressions of ...”

“... and children. The most charismatic name to survive this ill-documented period is that of Saint Patrick, who left texts, no less precious for being written in imperfect Latin, that cast some brilliant shafts of light on a turbulent but expanding Church. He tells us the name of his home town, ‘Bannavemtaberniae’, the identity of which has provoked much ...”