“... he didn’t find gifted or amusing enough. Among the first of the non-plumbers to arrive was Patrick O’Donovan, a red-faced, hard-living Irishman (Ampleforth, Christ Church and war service with the Irish Guards) who came on the recommendation of the diplomat Nico Henderson. He had never published a word in his life, but within a few years had acquired ...”

“... twang. He was so stoned he just smiled, picked up the magazine and walked back inside. Captain Patrick Hennessey suggested dropping a bomb, which everyone said was far too reckless as the Taliban were so close. He insisted he’d done it before and it worked. Before long we could hear an F-16 and Major David said: ‘Thirty seconds until impact.’ The ...”

“... she was taken under the wing of an overbearing Irish bus driver known in her autobiography as Patrick Reilly. Reilly wanted a wife. ‘There’s no doubt,’ he assured Frame, ‘that I’m manager material.’ In her opinion, he was ‘yet another reject of a demanding world’. His romantic strategy was ‘never to take your eye off the quarry’. With ...”

“... time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of ...”

“... than anyone. Irish literature of the 20th century has been trying to alert us to this for years: Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’, Beckett’s Not I and All That Fall (‘Did you ever wish to kill a child?), McGahern’s The Barracks, Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place (which features one daughter sent to a mother and baby home in Dublin, and ...”

“... documents. Reporters found none of the drama that had been touted in the days after the raid. Patrick Cockburn wrote about the contrast between the administration’s initial claims that bin Laden was the ‘spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web’ and what the translations actually showed: that bin Laden was ‘delusional’ and had ‘limited ...”

“... costs for as long as the company chose to keep up the arrangement.But when Lamont and his boss, Patrick Jenkin, Secretary of State for Industry, together with a pair of supporting civil servants, arrived in the committee room on 9 December, things did not go as expected. A week before, the Committee had been sent a revised set of cost estimates, and as its ...”

“... there are echoes in works by Carleton and Yeats, but the two most recent works which refer to it, Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942) and Tom Murphy’s play Famine (1968), are much more concerned with the contemporary world, with the spiritual and emotional famine of their own times, as Fintan O’Toole has pointed out, even though ...”

“... invented names whose pay is collected by officers or bureaucrats. I heard Staff Sergeant Craig Patrick, who was training Iraqi troops, say: ‘It’s all about perception, to convince the American public that everything is going as planned and we’re right on schedule to be out of here. I mean, they can bullshit the American people, but they can’t ...”

“... messing about, was looked into by the Wolfenden Committee, and the eminent gay eye surgeon Patrick Trevor-Roper refuted it trenchantly as ‘totally devoid of any truth’.The bishop of Rochester, in the Lords debate on the Wolfenden report, was having none of this. It grows wearisome typing out this stuff, but I’ll give a flavour of his pitch:There ...”

“... start draining the land for ploughing. The only way he could be stopped was by a direct order from Patrick Jenkin, the environment secretary. Cabinet papers released recently show a furious squabble between Jenkin and his counterpart at the Ministry of Agriculture, Michael Jopling. Jenkin wanted to make the order, rather than lose part of the ‘traditional ...”

“... Leo Beegan met another stonecutter about his own age, Willie Pearse. Willie and his older brother, Patrick, both of whom were executed for their part in the Easter Rising, were the sons of a monumental stonemason. Pearse’s ecclesiastical architecture and stonemasonry business was on Great Brunswick Street in the centre of Dublin, round the back of Trinity ...”