“... when he entered King’s School, Canterbury (alma mater of Christopher Marlowe, Somerset Maugham, Patrick Leigh-Fermor), from which Brooke ran away in the first week. He was sent back. The second week he ran away again. The second withdrawal marked the termination of his residence there, which had lasted less than a fortnight. Brooke’s parents – whom he ...”

“... another pupil, Bobby Romanes. ‘They had real pistols and real powder,’ according to a witness, Patrick Campbell, ‘but no real bullets – not even a charge of redcurrant jelly to add to the apparent tragedy of the encounter. No doubt Stevenson enjoyed this mimic warfare.’ The response of their teacher, D’Arcy Thompson, is not recorded, but probably ...”

“... manuscript of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the meeting between Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse in the Patrick Hamilton novel of that title. But he had a devoted reader there, and I believe that the most revealing piece Jeremy wrote that term was directed at Jack Wolfenden, who in 1954 had been appointed by the Home Secretary (the egregious, homophobic David ...”

“... with reverence about the central figures in this drama – Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, Patrick Pearse – and, perhaps more significantly, manages to recruit figures such as Wilde, Joyce and Beckett, placing them posthumously in the pantheon of post-colonial writers who, by revolting into style, created a nation. He wants everyone who put pen to ...”

“... disco. Jones and Kantonen write about musicians and producers – from Giorgio Moroder to Patrick Adams – as well as influential record labels (like Casablanca and Salsoul) and clubs. Early in the book the authors make an effort to distance themselves from Abba and the Bee Gees (a strategy recommended to all serious advocates of disco) – those ...”

“... Bordeaux to their wills and their tastes. At Château Mouton-Rothschild, the technical director, Patrick Léon, explains that ‘Bordeaux had to adapt to global tastes’: that is, to Parker-Rolland and their aesthetic machine. Château Kirwan in Margaux engaged Rolland as their consultant a few years ago and their Parker scores rocketed as the wines became ...”

“... private be decriminalised. Speaking at the British Academy in March 1959, the conservative jurist Patrick Devlin bridled at the committee’s contention that there is ‘a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business’ and that only concrete acts of injury or harm should be prosecuted and punished by ...”

“... of the Universe often end up with their trainers, and Julia was going out with hers, a man called Patrick. I was fascinated by these powerful women. Instead of being the escorts of presidents, they ended up marrying their hairdressers. They were the fairy princesses trapped inside ivory towers. They only met co-stars and staff. Like Madonna, Julia smelt ...”

“... age of seventeen and a half, but the internal backbiting continues. The current team coach, Patrick Kiens, was brought in from the Netherlands, which many Romanians involved in gymnastics seem to find insulting. Some gymnasts have refused to be coached by ‘the Dutch’, and in the mixed zone at the world championships last year, Ana ...”

“... to the Architecture of London is of a healthy if lugubrious city, a liveable place even if, as Patrick Keiller later put it, most of the interesting people there would rather be somewhere else. By 2013, we still have most of that city, but it coexists with and is distorted by an increasingly suffocating and dystopian capital, where space is ...”

“... and the crofters, who had spent their lives working the land, were not competent at sea. Patrick Sellar, the Sutherland family’s agent, referred to the inhabitants of the crofts he was destroying as ‘primitives’ and ‘aborigines’, which adds a pinch (but only a pinch) of justice to the idea that, in his thinking as well as his methods, he ...”

“... didn’t get bracketed with the wave of French-Jewish self-exploration initiated a year later by Patrick Modiano’s La Place de l’étoile. His French biographer, Myriam Anissimov, found evidence that he’d downplayed his Litvak background after his arrival in Nice and thinks he viewed it as an obstacle to social success in 1930s France. (‘He wasn’t ...”

“... own terms, setting them within an Irish imaginative space made habitable largely by the example of Patrick Kavanagh, and finding a thick, costive, consonantal music for the task (‘the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat’). He was especially struck by a book called The New Poetic (1964) by the New Zealand poet C.K. Stead that portrayed an Eliot very different ...”

“... of Burns. In this respect and others, Burns is like a peasant poet of modern times, the Irishman Patrick Kavanagh, who spent many hard and lonely years as a farmer, and of whom Seamus Heaney, another Irish poet with close ties to the world of the countryside, has written: ‘he wrested his idiom bare-handed out of a literary nowhere.’ ‘I am ...”

“... sanity of Wilkinson and Townshend. Edwin Meese III sees the danger of over-reaction, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan stresses the importance of governments observing the law – ‘lest terrorists win by inducing a kind of bunker terrorism’. John O’Sullivan emphasises the need to deny them publicity. In the best piece in the book Leszek Kolakowski discusses ...”