“... notice). The following day, part of the text of a pompous letter from the Solicitor-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, to Heseltine informing him that he had made a few trivial mistakes in a letter he had written on the Westlands business to Lloyds Bank, was mysteriously leaked to the newspapers. Two days later, on 8 January, Sir Raymond Lygo, chief executive of ...”

“... taste was probably on the lowbrow side’. He shows not a sign of having read Patrick Piggott’s charming book The Innocent Diversion, of 1979, which establishes, from the sheet music she owned and copied, that Jane Austen was a highly proficient keyboard performer and identifies, as by Daniel Gottlieb Steilbelt, the noisy pianoforte ...”

“... sentiment that has been shared by many UN observers, particularly Americans such as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York in his book about the UN called A Dangerous Place, which followed his short but stormy tenure of the post of US Ambassador there. His sense of outrage was aroused by the lopsided majority which placed the moral force of the UN ...”

“... not a symptom, of nostalgia, and his view of the English past has something in common with Patrick Wright’s illuminating analysis in On Living in an Old Country. Of course, the polished images of the surface are still there. Hill’s poetry would be blander if the acknowledgment of barbarism were not accompanied by powerful celebrations of the ...”

“... line one after another, signing separate agreements with Israel out of weakness. As the journalist Patrick Seale writes in his biography of the Syrian leader, Assad: The Struggle for the Middle East, Assad had always been a patient man, able to take the long view in conflicts with Arab rivals and in the contest with Israel. Believing that time was on the ...”

“... daughter, Sally, died suddenly of polio, in Java, where she had been living with her husband, Patrick Kavanagh. Just as Lehmann had at first faced the loss of Day-Lewis with disbelief, so she refused to accept Sally’s death, taking refuge this time in spiritualism. She became convinced that she was regularly in contact with her daughter. Her friend and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hitler’s obscure relatives, his half-brother Alois’s Irish wife Bridget and their son William Patrick Hitler, who for a time lived in Liverpool. The book is ‘edited’ and introduced by Michael Unger of the Liverpool Daily Post, who describes the discovery of the heavily ghost-written manuscript in New York Public Library. This is a sub-genre of ...”

“... 1950s by a broad range of scholars such as R.B. McDowell, Owen Dudley Edwards, F.S.L. Lyons and Patrick O’Farrell has profoundly altered our understanding: not only have ancient myths been invalidated, but the structure of a genuinely Irish history now exists, free from the Anglo-centric emphasis still common twenty years ago. Questions can be asked about ...”

“... Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World (2018), the geographer Patrick Nunn collected consistent, detailed, verifiable tales of flooded landscapes, disappearing coastlines and newly born islands preserved in oral traditions from Australia to the Scottish highlands. They only make sense as transmitted memories of the great ...”

“... So did Australia’s most celebrated historian, Manning Clark, and its most celebrated writer, Patrick White. A new bitterness, of the kind that divided Britain over Suez and the United States over Vietnam, now split Australia. That Whitlam had greatly contributed to his own destruction by his indifference to economic reality – the oil price rise came ...”

“... Cambridge introductions to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars and biographers. Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers ...”

“... well understand how upsetting this must have been, particularly since O’Brien’s adopted son, Patrick, is black, and O’Brien has a quite faultless record on all questions of race and apartheid. But the fact is that, though he writes a pretty good general summary of the situation in South Africa, he is a little out of his depth there. In particular, he ...”

“... 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 ...”