“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Place’s day did have some virtually and actually criminal members (such as ‘Jew’ King and Patrick Duffin), and some exceptionally dissolute ones (such as ‘Dr’ Watson, Thomas Preston and Thistlewood). Place probably knew that Spence’s social vision included working-class ‘feasts of hospitality and love’ complete with ‘cheering ...”

“... stream of almost research-free popular Lives and would-be popular Lives (a genre ably parodied by Patrick Barlow’s Shakespeare: The Truth, or, From Glover to Genius, 1993), as well as important work on particular phases or aspects of the Bard’s life by Honigmann, Stanley Wells and others, but Shakespeare: A Life can make some claim to be the first ...”

“... privately as possible, and at Twelve o’clock at Night’ in the great aisle of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, where he had been Dean since 1714. A tablet of black marble was to be fixed to the wall ‘with the following Inscription in large Letters, deeply cut, and strongly gilded’: HIC DEPOSITUM EST CORPUS JONATHAN SWIFT, S.T.D. HUJUS ECCLESIAE ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... four symbols instead of two. Manchester was a brilliant place in Todd’s day, the staff including Patrick Blackett, Willis Jackson, Michael Polanyi and the historian L.B. Namier. When the war came, Todd was made chairman of the chemical committee responsible for the development and production of chemical warfare agents. After the war I served under Todd on a ...”

“... Doolittle, Mr Silver persuasively sees the relation of Shaw, as ‘playwright-director’, to Mrs Patrick Campbell, his first Eliza and last sweetheart. I think he is wrong, however, in supposing Higgins to be ‘quite unlike Shaw in regarding himself first as a scientist’, with a ‘laboratory fitted out with a laryngoscope, burners, tuning forks’ and ...”

“... the dying days of the Ancien Régime. Jane’s sailor-brother Captain Frank Austen reports in the Patrick O’Brian style on the high point of his naval career when, off St Domingo on 6 February 1806, his ship Canopus gave a French three-decker ‘a tickling which knocked all his sticks away’. Where there’s insufficient material Nokes returns to standard ...”

“... of the Behavioural Insights Team (aka the ‘Nudge Unit’), in a BBC News interview, but also by Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. As late as 13 March, he told Radio 4 that one of the ‘key things we need to do [is] build up some kind of herd immunity’. On 15 March, under growing pressure as other European states banned mass ...”

“... the loyalty of fans. The actors in the leading role proceeded from William Hartnell (1963-66) to Patrick Troughton (1966-69), to Jon Pertwee (1970-74), to Tom Baker (1974-82). Baker is the one everyone remembers, for demographic reasons and because he did it longest, but also because he did it best, animating a Doctor who, as Newman says, ‘thought and felt ...”

“... what had helped the British economy grow ‘so wondrously’, the Guardian’s finance reporter Patrick Collinson wrote ‘The answer [is] the rise of the landlord class … in modern Britain, it seems, putting up the rent is somehow regarded as economic growth … Germany makes millions of cars, Japan still makes consumer electronics. Britain produces ...”

“... 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 ...”