“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... golfers such as P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, and only a little inferior to Malcolm Lowry and Patrick Hamilton, who were golfers as well as drinkers of championship class. This devotion to sport went with a declared aversion to women and, at this stage, to sex in any form. He told Carpenter in 1911 that he was ‘still unspotted’, and so he seems to ...”

“... 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 ...”