“... as members of the customs union and the single market?Free trade zealots such as the economist Patrick Minford are happy to say in public that they wouldn’t mind seeing large parts of the British agriculture and automotive industries disappear so long as there was a net increase in national wealth. This is not, I think, what voters in Sunderland and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But, strangely, he omits to follow his own insights through into any explicit engagement with Patrick Devlin’s brilliant Blackstone Lecture, ‘The Power without the Right’, published in The Judge (1979), which ought to be the bench-mark from which any discussion of the jury’s role must start. We have got our noses pressed too close against the ...”

“... average. The ‘not’ factor explained things like de Valera’s extraordinary speech on St Patrick’s Day in 1943. He said that Ireland would be a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the rompings of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and ...”

“... produce remarkable writers, such as the architects of the créolité movement, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. For them, assimilation, Negritude and nationalism all share the same problem: they are ways of avoiding the island’s complexity. ‘The identity of assimilation,’ Chamoiseau writes, ‘protects us against the chaos of ...”

“... way you look at it, Heathcliff lacks an obvious point of origin.Is he perhaps of Irish descent, as Patrick Brontë was? It’s a reasonable enough assumption to make about a novel written and published during the years of the famine. But Liverpool was at the time of Mr Earnshaw’s visit the nation’s major slave-trading port. So is Heathcliff of African ...”

“... himself up and recognising his version of the West as a well-trodden Arcadia – an aspect of what Patrick Kavanagh mordantly referred to as ‘the Irish thing’. Being a ‘nature poet’ in such a locality is indeed, as Kiberd says, a highly self-conscious affair: the whole point is that you’re not one of the locals, just as Wordsworth was an offcomer in ...”

“... mobility having stalled – a phenomenon which none of the books mentions. In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent relationship ...”

“... A coincidence: I wrote the first page of ‘It’ on St Patrick’s Day with Irish pipers tuning up down in the street 12 floors beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush and my bones frozen to the marrow ...”

“... When a French government minister and the prosecutor publicly asserted the guilt of one defendant, Patrick Allenet de Ribemont, France was held by Strasbourg to have breached his right to a fair trial. How then to achieve a fair trial in the US, where it is open season on every accused, and where the very fact of entitlement to a trial in these cases is the ...”