“... their affliction on themselves (but then so were lepers). ‘The poor homosexuals’, wrote Patrick Buchanan, a columnist in the New York Post, ‘they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.’ Sickened by this sort of mumbo-jumbo, homosexuals have tended to be suspicious of the establishment, which naturally ...”

“... Cometh the hour, cometh the word. In an intriguing piece of research for Sleaze, Stuart Weir and Patrick Donleavy have counted the appearances of the S-word in British national newspapers. In 1985-6, it appeared 21 times; in 1994-95, 3479 times. The word still has no precise meaning. Often it refers to politicians’ sexual behaviour, which has probably ...”

“... that an embargo on military equipment was in place. At the United Nations, the US Ambassador Patrick Moynihan did everything he could to line up support to block UN diplomatic intervention – he boasted in his memoirs of his success. Two factors came to determine Washington’s policy. First and foremost was the gratitude of its Vietnam War-era ...”

“... recent years has been the ‘gate’ theory of pain developed in the Sixties by Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall. Discarding the old mechanical ‘fire-alarm’ theory as simplistic, they argued that controls operate all the way from the nerve endings to the brain. When messages from the nerve ends reach the spinal cord, a fine-tuning takes place regulating the ...”

“... by Brexit that the parliamentary debate on its findings was attended by only a handful of MPs. Patrick Porter’s Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (2018) showed that responsibility lay with the British elite as a whole and couldn’t be limited to Blair. But Porter’s account also perpetuated the official story that the war ‘exposed the deadliness of ...”

“... and she has an aphoristic way of concentrating layers of meaning into her sentences, which, as Patrick Leigh-Fermor has remarked, ‘always fall on their feet with a light, spontaneous and unfaltering aptness’. Gertrude’s wealth insulated her from vulgar professionalism: had she been born poor, or a generation later, she would certainly have been an ...”

“... At RUSI’s annual land warfare conference in June, the current chief of the general staff, Patrick Sanders, praised the British army’s response to the crisis and said he would now have an answer for his grandchildren if they asked what he did in 2022.These institutions do make some less boosterish contributions. Chatham House publishes International ...”

“... Michael Voslensky. In the United States in the 1960s, neoconservatives, most notably Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recycled the phrase ‘the New Class’ to refer to parasitic public sector bureaucrats who were making the US ‘a society of public affluence and private squalor’. With Khrushchev in power, Tito prepared for rapprochement. Each leader had ...”

“... posterity, he had interviewed a number of potential writers to undertake an authorised biography. Patrick French got the job. The World Is What It Is (2008) is long, detailed and discursive. It was a painful book to read, because much of Naipaul’s life was lived in struggle, pain, occasionally rage, depression and disturbance. But there was a ...”

“... his use of pauses and political aspiration alike as descending directly from the same qualities in Patrick Hamilton; John Arden’s cascades of language and desire from O’Casey’s; or, to take an American example, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 from the savagery of Ring Lardner’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. Small wonder that writers from Robert Graves to Noel ...”

“... à trois. Simenon was mapping out futures, more or less tormented, for the three of them. As Patrick Marnham remarks in his excellent 1994 biography, ‘the account of the experience became part of the experience.’ Neither woman headed for the door. Simenon by this time was a multimillionaire. How does Inspector Maigret fit into all this? For if ...”

“... Pygmalion she gives away her social origins by her choice of intensifier. When the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell said the line onstage in 1914 she tested the tolerance of London theatregoers to the limit: they paused, then laughed uproariously. A swear word became known as ‘a Pygmalion word’. ‘Swearing’ in English covers two distinct but ...”

“... Congress and the American people. Wills nevertheless makes a strong case, elaborating on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s argument in Secrecy: The American Experience (1998), that the short-term political advantages of concealing crimes and embarrassments and of blindsiding congressional opponents are outweighed by the long-term costs. ‘Policy,’ as he ...”

“... us how they set about their task. In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had ...”

“... Two days after becoming taoiseach in 1979, for example, Haughey approached the property developer Patrick Gallagher to ask for help in clearing his huge debt with Allied Irish Bank. Gallagher gave him £300,000 out of what he later testified was ‘a sense of duty’. Fianna Fáil politicians were not the only ones involved. In his testimony to the Mahon ...”