“... policy in Northern Ireland. In January 1988, the then Attorney-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, told the Commons that, given certain ‘considerations of national security’, no charges would be brought against eight named RUC officers for various offences including conspiracy to murder, nor against certain MI5 officers involved in ...”

“... Maidenhead. I didn’t know it was wicked until later when I read the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton. My aunt certainly wasn’t wicked. When she stepped out of the house she would usually go, not down into the town itself, but in the other direction up to what were called ‘the fields’ and on to Maidenhead Thicket. She was away for ...”

“... of the statement that has been made tonight.’ Twenty-six days later a leading Belfast solicitor, Patrick Finucane, an effective and hard-working defender of people facing charges of terrorism, was shot dead by Protestant terrorists. The report of a committee of European lawyers commented: ‘It is hard to imagine that Douglas Hogg, a barrister who is the son ...”

“... Four angels held back the winds of destruction. Until the redeemed had received the seal of the living God, nothing could be harmed. But now the servants of God are sealed, and the seventh seal has been opened. Six trumpets have sounded. A third of the trees have burned, a third of the sea has turned to blood, a third of the heavens has been darkened, and a third of mankind has been killed ...”

“... invented city, populated by cut-out symbols of oppression. Where are these phantom wine-bars? As Patrick Wright points out in A Journey through Ruins, it is a brutal ‘half-hour hike’ from the Bow Quarter fortress for anyone thirsty enough to trade life and shoulder-bag for a lime meniscus in their Mexican beer. Wine-bars in the neighbourhood of Kingsland ...”

“... most notorious assassination – the ‘political murder’ of Wrong’s subtitle – was that of Patrick Karegeya, Kagame’s former childhood friend, comrade-in-arms and security chief. In 2006 Kagame had him jailed for ‘insubordination’ – his second stint in prison. On his release he fled to South Africa and formed an opposition party in exile. At ...”

“... of a sliced head of red cabbage and here evocative of churning surf. This stone is identified by Patrick Rogers in his guide to the cathedral’s stones as ‘Fantastico Viola’, a recent trade name for a variety of richly veined marble from the quarries of Carrara and Seravezza.It may be that when marbles were thought to be liquid in origin – when ‘few ...”

“... 1950s, the USS Robert E. Lee was the third commissioned – after the George Washington and the Patrick Henry, but before the Abraham Lincoln. Adulation came from abroad, too: de Gaulle, touring Gettysburg with Eisenhower, praised Lee as the most brilliant general of the Civil War. Churchill, perhaps the most extravagant in a long line of Tory ...”

“... describe the feelings of English people in America a century earlier.The point is surely that, as Patrick Collinson argued in a famous essay about the Elizabethan ‘monarchical republic’ (absent from Suranyi’s bibliography), it was possible to have expectations of one’s superiors, defend oneself by law and custom, and feel like a citizen – as in a ...”

“... selections do a similar thing similarly well: Umberto Saba translated by Derek Mahon, Ungaretti by Patrick Creagh, Maria Luisa Spaziani by Beverly Allen. But many others are more limited. In Biographia Literaria Coleridge illustrates the workings of metaphor with some made-up lines which do not pretend to be poetry but nonetheless go through poetical ...”

“... as the third most common cause of death in them, after syphilis of the brain and tuberculosis. Patrick Manson, a classmate of Ogston’s at Aberdeen University and the first to prove that mosquito bites could spread disease, called it ‘the very fatal type of dysentery, euphemistically called “colitis”, which is the scourge and disgrace of lunatic ...”

“... wild romantic agonies of his later attachments (usually to actresses, and most dramatically to Mrs Patrick Campbell, the original Eliza Doolittle) confirmed Shaw’s conviction that ‘the quantity of love that an ordinary person can stand without serious damage is about ten minutes in 50 years.’ For Gibbs, however, Shaw’s love life is both more extensive ...”

“... me than so many somethings.’ The nothings that make up most e-mails are not all that sweet; in Patrick Marber’s play Closer there is a silent scene in which the dialogue appears on a screen suspended above the stage and two actors sit typing beneath. When Larry sends an electronic message for the first time (‘Nice 2 meet U’) he is surprised to be ...”

“... inverted commas or turning them inside out. So plays like Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, Patrick Marber’s Closer and Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life explore disjunction through what happens between scenes rather than within them, and challenge the centrality of the individual in an art form which has traditionally had the individual at its ...”

“... as a poet. The best sampling of Ungaretti in English is still the Selected Poems translated by Patrick Creagh (1971). After the war, Ungaretti married and then settled in Rome, where he earned a living by producing digests of foreign newspapers for a government publication. There were lecture tours and trips abroad for the sake of travel-writing (later ...”