“... the end of November 1993, the Prime Minister and his Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, had been utterly convincing in their determination never to deal with terrorists of any sort. Then it emerged that the Government had all along been engaged in dialogue not with the mere ‘pseudo-terrorist’ Gerry Adams but with the IRA ...”

“... removes perhaps some millions of American children from the welfare rolls. Even Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who first opened the argument about the cultural pathology of poverty when he was working for the Nixon Administration, has professed himself appalled at the callousness and want of discrimination which characterise the new dispensation. Marion ...”

“... required the shedding of blood, the subject of Yeats’s poem ‘The Rose Tree’ (1920), in which Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, leading figures in the 1916 Dublin Rising, concur that ‘nothing but our own red blood/Can make a right Rose Tree.’ (Pearse had declared that it would take ‘the blood of the sons of Ireland to redeem Ireland’.) Yeats said ...”

“... for returning to work he claimed to loathe, Beckett assigned the task of translating Molloy to Patrick Bowles, a young South African. The decision was extraordinary. In the late 1930s, after an early attempt at collaboration, Beckett had taken over the French translation of Murphy and done the job himself. It was an immense task to bring into a foreign ...”

“... office workers, and street gangs pretending they are riding with Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Patrick Wright, in Passport to Peking, quotes the Labour politician Morgan Phillips, who visited China as part of a delegation in 1954. ‘As I saw the great mass of cycles on the road I was reminded of a day in Bedford during the last war … The workers were ...”

“... incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria,’ said Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the DIA. ‘He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out. He wouldn’t shut up.’ Flynn told me his problems went ...”

“... poured – and still pour – off the presses, from C.S. Forester through Dennis Wheatley to Patrick O’Brian. Over time, this output has yielded a teeming universe that can be glimpsed in such omnibus guides as What Historical Novel Do I Read Next?, with its capsule descriptions of more than 6000 titles, and league tables of the most popular historical ...”

“... that a piece of chalk mentioned to the police by Vincent Maguire, aged 16, and a candle by Patrick Maguire, aged 13, ‘fitted the description better’ of a stick of gelignite wrapped in white paper. Both were convicted and imprisoned on this evidence, together with their parents and their uncle Giuseppe Conlon, who was to die in prison. All were ...”

“... no vice-chancellor enthroned in Convocation waiting to take your voting paper and lift his hat as Patrick Neill tipped his twenty years ago. Now Neill is himself a candidate in what feels more like a local council election, with trestle tables, ushers and the proctors taking the votes. One of Tom Bingham’s proposers, I vote for him and no one else, the ...”

“... critically we are stitched into the particulars of the places where we choose to make our home. Patrick Keiller, a scrupulous observer from the misted windows of trains, added the Nine Elms Coal Hopper to his album of found architecture. The site was demolished in the winter of 1979-80, before being squatted by a car breaker. The Hopper lives on in ...”

“... Can we imagine either sentiment being expressed at Heathrow airport? The poet and novelist Patrick McGuinness, in his forthcoming book Other People’s Countries (itself a rich analysis of home and homelessness; McGuinness is half-Irish and half-Belgian) quotes Simenon, who was asked why he didn’t change his nationality, ‘the way successful ...”

“... best (or worst) of them combined the secrecy of Whitehall with the languor of Fitzrovia. It was Patrick Hamilton in conversation with George Smiley down a blind alley off Rathbone Place, with froth sliding down the insides of pint tumblers and lipsticked fags in every ashtray. Men such as Gamlin practically lived in Langham Place: their outer bounds were ...”

“... When the black slaves of Montserrat planned a rebellion in 1768, the date they chose was St Patrick’s Day, because they thought the plantation owners would be partying. Deane’s sympathy with Mitchel’s struggle against the British leads him to balance with care but not to obscure Mitchel’s role in white supremacy: his ‘passionately rational ...”

“... changed, changed utterly.’ Later, as the fields rolled by, I asked him if he had known Patrick Kavanagh: ‘I only spent one afternoon with him,’ he said, ‘and I felt lucky to get out alive. I remember I asked him if he liked Thomas Hardy’s poems and of course he took that to be a kind of insult, as if I was asking a country poet if he liked ...”

“... part of his or her creative process. One of the Creativity Explored artists I collect is John Patrick Mckenzie, whose images are from one angle repetitive in the extreme. Mckenzie takes any surface he can – often white foam core – and prints streams of words across it using a black Sharpie pen. He has his own idiosyncratic, instantly recognisable ...”