“... 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 ...”

“... were asleep, were the two most high-profile runners in the history of the force, John Townsend and Patrick Macmanus. When, a day or so later, Hardy’s colleague John Thelwall was tapped on the shoulder and led off to prison, another well-known runner, Thomas Carpmeal, was one of the arresting party. However respectable the runners seemed to loyalists, to ...”

“... of Lords was dismantled and recast in the 1870s. The story of how that happened is well told in Patrick Polden’s section on the law courts. Although it was the supreme appellate forum in civil matters (there was no real criminal appeal system), the House of Lords had a chaotic procedure in which the quorum of three could be made up of any peers, legally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Museum of Art in New York) as well as a long-serving translator who has rendered Raymond Roussel, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras and many others. ‘A good translation,’ he writes, ‘offers not a reproduction of the work but an interpretation, a re-representation, just as the performance of a play or a sonata is a representation of the script or the ...”

“... 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 attention, an obsession with fashion detail the like of which we haven’t seen since Patrick Bateman was looking out his tie in American Psycho, and, then, of course, there’s the friends. Lulu has more than your average head for vertiginous name-dropping: it’s Elton this and John Lennon that, insecurity all the way, but this doesn’t stop ...”

“... returned. He came back to England. Just in time for Margaret Thatcher. The cultural historian Patrick Wright, a man with a secret fondness for poetry (holograph Louis Zukofsky on the wall), made the trip at the same time, decanted from Vancouver. Those hazy overseas slots were vanishing and England was going mad. ‘I felt,’ Wright wrote in On Living in ...”

“... into workplace productivity. But sibling rivalry was also at work. In 1925 her brother, Patrick Blackett, had become the first person deliberately to transmute one element into another, by firing alpha particles into nitrogen atoms in a laboratory in Cambridge. (He was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.) Milner’s research was arguably just ...”

“... of St Bridget’s Confraternity in the early 1880s, led by Father Sheridan, a priest at St Patrick’s in Soho, mainly comprised humorous readings, with rosaries the only brief nod to observance. In his register, Sheridan constantly congratulated himself on the uproarious laughter he provoked. Priests had a relationship not only with the devout but ...”

“... as romantic or erotic.’ He also thinks it very likely that James had sexual relationships with Patrick Gray, Alexander Lindsay and Anne Murray, countess of Kinghorne, but only possibly with George Gordon, marquess of Huntly, James Hay, 1st earl of Carlisle and Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke. Russell’s method is to apply ‘common sense’ to words ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”