“... of post-liberals’ uncertainty about which direction to take was a book called Regime Change by Patrick Deneen, one of Orbán’s great fans and fellow-travellers, which was published in 2023. Deneen, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, had risen to prominence five years earlier after the appearance of his short book, Why Liberalism ...”

“... and television and on the stage, playing Harry Hope, the irascible bar-owner in The Iceman Cometh. Patrick Magee, who played Slade the anarchist in the same production, said: ‘In a kind of funny way, as we went through rehearsal, Jackie became more and more like Harry Hope – you could actually see it. When he finally did it, it was absolutely ...”

“... recent swine-flu standards stayed remarkably calm. There were some alarms and amusing excursions: Patrick Jenkin, the energy minister, advised people to save electricity by cleaning their teeth in the dark (and then newspapers printed pictures of Jenkin’s own house ablaze with light). But the winter was mild and people coped. Output per labour hour actually ...”

“... question a total hunchback population of 13. This is the most felicitous use of statistics since Patrick Marnham’s account of the Lucan case. (Noting that Lucan, in his days as an inhouse gambler at the Clermont Club, ate nothing but lamb cutlets, summer and winter, Marnham worked out the approximate number of sheep the disappearing milord must have ...”

“... them. The IRA was active in the complex. The first child killed in the conflict, nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, died in his family’s flat there in August 1969, after the army fired a Browning machine gun at the block during a gun battle. There was an army post on top of the tower and an army barracks just up the road in the old mill at Albert Street. Soon ...”

“... all the correspondents came back home. You can count the exceptions on the fingers of one hand: Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, one or two others. Iraq’s social infrastructure still isn’t working, years after the occupation ended; it’s been wrecked. The country has been demodernised. The West has destroyed Iraq’s education services and medical ...”

“... that’s not quite true.) There was a thorough biography in 1988 by the scientist Harold Carter; Patrick O’Brian’s Life, published a year earlier, was a well-researched and ripping yarn, as you’d expect from the author of the ‘Aubrey/Maturin’ romans fleuves, in which a character based on Banks appears; two excellent accounts from the 1990s by the ...”

“... like a transmission from another era. But the practice of moulding the intake has continued. Patrick Hennessey, the author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, served from 2004 to 2009. ‘What I find slightly depressing,’ he recalled of Sandhurst, ‘is that it was a genuinely diverse place at the point of entry. A bunch of normal guys and girls in ...”

“... through correspondence with people she never met or hadn’t seen for years. (Among them was Patrick O’Brian, another writer in flight from England, who dedicated his fourth Aubrey-Maturin novel, The Mauritius Command, to her.) Otherwise, she had little interest in the literary world. When she encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet ...”

“... raised. Even more charitable grinding has taken place just before on behalf of a living writer, Patrick White (the contradictory demands of national and international literary histories put many cabbages out of the chronological straight line). Where Beckett, whose prose fiction deserves more consideration, gets nine lines, and Chandler only dates of birth ...”

“... which she declared her love for his work and explained how she used it) but placed beside it Patrick Heron’s recollection of the painful meeting between Moore and Thatcher when she was Minister of State for Education. Modern Painters allows the art which Fuller dislikes to be defended and even gives his critical opponents space in its pages. Everything ...”

“... is rather in two minds about Lowood/Cowan Bridge. She scrupulously notes the major anomaly: would Patrick Brontë – ‘naturally kind-hearted’ – have kept his children at a school only fifty miles away where they were being tortured literally to death? Fraser concludes that Charlotte’s account was ‘clouded by emotion’ but ‘somewhere close to the ...”

“... Vladimir Zhirinovsky is a lens through which we can see the character of contemporary Russians close up and grotesquely exaggerated. The Zhirinovsky glass reveals and enlightens like a Francis Bacon portrait. Even before the elections shot him to prominence, Zhirinovsky was in the habit of issuing threats of an apocalyptic kind – nuclear strikes against Japan and Germany, Russian expansion to the Indian Ocean, the ‘annihilation’ of the Nato armies ...”

“... at Independence Stadium, wrestling with the shock of discoveringthat a Rand Daily Mail reporter, Patrick Laurence, had just shot his bird by publishing an excellent political history of Transkeiup to the eve of Independence, and wondering how he could rescue his own academic enterprise. He decided that, rather than wait a few years to write a political ...”

“... left, though their influence survived in various transformations – for example, the work of Patrick Geddes. Positivists were supposed to be active in public affairs, and Harrison had strong opinions on practically everything. Though a keen patriot, he thought India should be returned to the Indians, and Gibraltar to Spain. Still under thirty, he wrote ...”