“... 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 ...”

“... the city to connect stations on its outskirts via the centre has its origins in the town planner Patrick Abercrombie’s utopian plans for postwar London. For Abercrombie, the Blitz had created an opportunity: we could pack displaced Londoners off to ‘new towns’, plant vegetables where their houses had been, and sink the railways. Blackfriars ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as well as a number of supportive MPs, refugee and migrant centre workers, black activists such as Patrick Vernon, and the Guardian, which gave space to Gentleman’s stories over a long period. Yet despite the scandal, the widespread public shame, the apology and resignation of the home secretary Amber Rudd, and the promise from her replacement Sajid Javid of ...”

“... his behaviour in the later stages of their marriage to that of Jack Manningham, the villain in Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight, who sets out by a series of fiendish tricks to convince his wife that she is mad. Snowdon did actually persuade the princess to visit a psychiatrist.She was in fact perfectly capable of looking after her own interests. She ...”

“... with her, but I didn’t like her very much.’ As if in homage to Ray’s dislike, his biographer Patrick McGilligan refers to Grahame several times as a ‘sexy blonde actress’, and writes that ‘many of those who knew Grahame considered her a nymphomaniac.’ It wasn’t just those who knew her. In Peter Turner’s succinct, sad memoir, Film Stars ...”

“... Rose Cumming, of the purple hair and magnificent display windows; ‘the fascinating Mr [Herman Patrick] Tappé’, another ‘truly original designer’; and Nona Park and Sophie Shonnard of Chez Ninon, the discreet seller of approved reproductions (and modifications) of Paris couture to US society women, who took Cunningham under their wing, brought him ...”

“... Spain. (Some distant booms and cannon shots from this episode may be found in the later novels of Patrick O’Brian.) Is it too fanciful to see a common and self-consciously phlegmatic character as well? Chile is divided almost as surely from its continental neighbours, by the spine of the Andes, as is Britain by the Channel. The outlook is maritime: the ...”

“... beach made me witness to a quite interesting gangbang in which the principal performers were Patrick (and equipage, rather to my surprise) and a German of remarkable handsomeness and Royal physique. I merely held the gloves, as it were, but it was quite interesting en plein air.’ Then it’s on to Spoleto: ‘This place is mad – Festival of Fifty ...”

“... the problem of representation was ultimately not so much political as epistemological,’ John Patrick Diggins wrote in 1991 in an essay in Political Theory:In Public Opinion, he suggested that the political misinformation plaguing the American people might be corrected by a bureau of experts capable of screening and organising the news to make it more ...”

“... Colonial”, but hardly in the patrician sense of Robert Lowell’s or, to stick to Australia, Patrick White’s. None of the Porters has ever made Who’s Who in Australia, though family legend has it that my great grandfather was Lord Mayor of Brisbane for a time in the 1880s ... I have to dress up my material: it is very ordinary stuff.’ This is ...”

“... as of Tyndall, but also the core of ecological thought which the anarchists and their allies, like Patrick Geddes and Aldous Huxley, so significantly anticipated. Inescapably present as well is the mountainscape and the life it shelters, the poet’s concrete world, and beyond it the world of thought, ‘beyond the mountains’ where old kings and old poets ...”

“... became a national creed. Their most grotesque proponent was, of course, Margaret Thatcher, whom Patrick Wright once diagnosed as forever ‘redeclaring the Second World War’. Now, however, there is a growing unease about war memory in this country. Evident in last year’s arguments over the D-Day celebrations, it was evident again early this year in the ...”

“... Watson at Gonville and Caius. (Mr Prynne, I’m told, doesn’t have much use for fiction: Patrick White excepted.) Poetry was struck off in the Eighties. Now it’s a special-interest item, available on prescription – like Southern Gothic vampirism, Uzi and crack Brixton scorchers, cyberpunk. Like the rest of genre fiction it is dealt with in ...”

“... 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 ...”