“... British Consul in Mersin, is the niece of the first prime minister of Northern Ireland; Sir Patrick Coghill, head of the British Security Mission in Syria at the time of Dakak’s imprisonment, was a nephew of Admiral Somerville. O’Neill himself feels the weight of Britain’s power when he visits Latrun, where Dakak spent most of his ...”

“... any other standard of right and wrong that made him more than a match for opponents like Senator Patrick Leahy, the head of the judiciary committee in 2007-8, or Jay Rockefeller, the head of the intelligence committee in those years. Leahy and Rockefeller had their chance to subject him to investigation when the Democrats became the majority party in ...”

“... last it was a very good show. No trace here of the Rosamund Tea Rooms in The Slaves of Solitude, Patrick Hamilton’s pitiless study of wartime Britain set in a provincial boarding house; no notion either that the 1945 election was anything but a unanimous call to extend the spirit of wartime solidarity, even though a fair number of the country’s ruling ...”

“... events. In this sense, his new novel’s title carries the same air of knowing overstatement as Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’. It may be that Tóibín’s most significant gift is a very basic and mysterious one: he creates fictional worlds in which readers find it easy to believe. The Spanish mountain village in The South, the Wexford coastal town in The ...”

“... would I mind, me name is Paddy.”’ Jim delivers this line in an oirish accent. ‘His name was Patrick,’ he explains, ‘and do you know what?’ Silence. ‘I had to fill out a form saying that I didn’t mind being called Tubby. True. It’s political correctness gone fucking mad.’ The team musters a laugh. Someone tries to move things on with a joke ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sonnetish trick of describing a small occasion in a way that suggests an obscured larger history. Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’ turns a boundary dispute between Irish farmers into a Homeric encounter. Geoffrey Hill, the modern master of the sonnet as vehicle for embedded history, reflects on the idea of England in one of the sonnets from ‘An Apology for ...”

“... began when one of Curll’s hackney authors, working his way through a geography textbook by Patrick Gordon, chanced on an inadvertent double entendre in Gordon’s survey of the Netherlands: ‘viz. “the Country lying very low, its Soil is naturally very wet and fenny.” Ha! said he, the same may be said of a **** as well as of Holland; this Whim ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... usually dated from 1871 to 1914, originated in 1915 with the Scottish biologist and planner Patrick Geddes, was popularised by David Landes in The Unbound Prometheus in 1965, and was affirmed most recently, though with a different starting date, by Vaclav Smil.†) Highly developed craft skills, rapid growth in scientific and medical knowledge, and mass ...”

“... Mystery surrounds the fate of Norm’s first wife, the mother of Penny’s older half-brothers – Patrick, a gentle semi-dropout, and Matt, an angry waste-disposal entrepreneur who’s projected, from the get-go, as a sexually threatening figure. He’s first seen, in a flashback, forcefully bundling the adolescent Penny into her bed, brushing her thigh with ...”

“... he’d slept with the wife of one of his professors. He was also an acolyte of the sociologist Patrick Geddes, who had just published The Evolution of Sex, which served as an ‘ethical endorsement of desire’ and defended the use of contraception. Daniell, whom Rowbotham variously describes as brilliant, imperious and quivering with ‘excessive ...”

“... in Seattle in 1999. In 2000, protesters injured 23 police officers at the funeral in Brooklyn of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed Haitian-American killed by an undercover cop. Were these anticipations of the current moment? Is it different this time around? Leftists once took comfort in the idea that every generation of radicals is doomed to fail, except the ...”

“... a knack for arousing hostility’, according to her biographer Hazel Rowley. Rowley describes Patrick White inviting Stead to lunch. White had championed her in her old age, loudly praised her work and supported her with cash transfers masked as prizes. Stead, at this point a heavy drinker, ‘arrived in a taxi, with a bag of empty bottles which she asked ...”

“... of those angels – both as a cognisant individual and a celestial radio. Rilke goes on to ask, in Patrick Bridgwater’s translation:Oh, to whom can we thenturn in our need? Not to angels or men,and the knowing animals knowwe are not very securely at homein our interpreted world.Weinberger has made an infidel’s Book of Hours in an attempt to reinterpret a ...”