“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one social – among these private housing projects. No. 10 Blackheath Park, designed by Patrick Gwynne, is an outré, glamorous house, with a fetishistic black slate and black-tinted glass exterior, an imposing symmetrical plan and ostentatiously synthetic materials within – the walls are lined with ‘plastic cloth’, a material, as Francisco ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fighters heading east from northern Syria captured Mosul. Islamic State​ came out of Iraq, as Patrick Cockburn explains: the movement initially called the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), then the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis) or in Iraq and the Levant (Isil), had roots in al-Qaida in Iraq, which, under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, waged sectarian war on ...”

“... feeding off the power. At one point, our hero (George, not Bill) takes a fancy to Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze’s costar in Dirty Dancing, and he gets his people to sound out her people about whether she fancies a date. Yes she does! He goes to gatherings of Greek-Americans and they crowd round wanting to know when he is going to lift the curse of Dukakis ...”

“... the poor monarch, who had been staying in bed and biting himself. ‘The queen asked Farinelli,’ Patrick Barbier writes in The World of the Castrati (1996), to sing from a room adjoining the king’s bedroom. The effect was startling. Philip, who previously could find no diversion in anything, now appeared radiant. His face regained its composure, his smile ...”

“... Prince was ‘shrewd’ if ‘immoral’. In Britain, the influential 1602 translation by Simon Patrick of Innocent Gentillet’s treatise Anti-Machiavel managed to disseminate Machiavelli’s ideas, sometimes in garbled form, as it rebutted them. Gentillet notes with satisfaction that although he doesn’t know if the Medici (to one of whom, Lorenzo, The ...”