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“... provides two small examples of the point. One, an essay on the Glaswegian criminologist, Patrick Colquhoun, rescues a man of importance from near-oblivion and his ideas from misrepresentation. It will not be surprising if it leads to a burgeoning of scholarly interest in his opinions and their influence: for the moment it enriches our understanding ...”

“... to the 12th. The first chapter is an account of the historical background, written with panache by Patrick Wormald; the second an equally readable summary by Helmut Gneuss of the Old English language. ‘Beowulf’, the earliest epic poem in the English language, has a chapter to itself. Old English poetic metre and technique, the tenth-century refinement of ...”

“... owed much, he reckons, to the shrewd instinct of Pakenham to be rid of a professional candidate, Patrick Gordon-Walker, who would inherit favourable boundary changes to come, and stick in a single-issue, one-off candidate to keep that improving seat warm for himself. Such Renaissance thinking among the godly is fun. The tactic, he hints, was followed again ...”

“... of the Labour Party in the post-war years. One has only to think of Dick Crossman, Tony Crosland, Patrick Gordon-Walker and, of course, Hugh Gaitskell. This, coupled with his hatred of lefties like Nye Bevan, who he believed to be splitting the Labour Party, drove him simultaneously to be a ferocious witch-hunter on behalf of the right, and to the bottle. Mr ...”

“... given to the question of whether ‘complete’ meant ‘permanent’. On The World at One, Sir Patrick Mayhew was invited to respond to a (dubbed) interview with Martin McGuinness in which Sinn Fein’s vice-president had said the ceasefire would endure ‘in all circumstances’. Mayhew said he thought what Martin had had to say was of great ...”

“... that lessons be taken from some ravings in Isaiah and the Book of Revelations. My brother Patrick read the parable of the sower instead. Its lesson of prudent husbandry was spelled out in Watsonville. Was it fate or carpentry that had stricken some houses and spared others? Watsonville is a Third World town, like West Oakland low on the news agenda as ...”

“... mutants from beyond is so misleading. It accepted the Movement’s ‘parochialism’ (to adapt Patrick Kavanagh’s term), the part which Larkin admired, and identified with, in Betjeman: ‘In a time of global concepts, Betjeman insists on the little, the forgotten, the unprofitable, the obscure; the privately-printed book of poems, the chapel behind the ...”

“... eventually lifted as historians, filmmakers and novelists began to confront the memory of Vichy. Patrick Modiano’s amnesiac narrators are frequently trying to establish their identities in the darkness of the Occupation, in novels that pass themselves off as unreliable memoirs: one narrator, without identity papers and uncertain of his own name, constructs ...”

“... should be ‘cliath’, ‘fór’ has to be ‘fós’, in one place Shawn is mistaken for Patrick, in another ‘Eniskerry’ should be ‘Enniskerry’. The letters to MacKenna have also appeared in Professor Saddlemyer’s contribution to Irish Renaissance, edited by Robin Skelton and David Clark (Dolmen Press, 1965), but I suppose that volume is ...”

“... HTV series which spawned the book. We further learn that HTV’s ‘imaginative and courageous’ Patrick Dromgoole (a good director of avant-garde plays as an undergraduate, if I remember aright) ‘had the doubtful pleasure of footing the bills’ for the claret granita and the spaghetti with black truffles. However, Carrier and his feudal retainers can at ...”

“... Soane favoured and in which his annotations flow most freely. In Sicily he and his friends used Patrick Brydone’s Tour through Sicily and Malta, testing the learned author on every point with mischievous good humour. The tempo of these excursions was fairly brisk and Soane’s companions were not of the kind to tolerate delay occasioned by sketching and ...”

“... now pays a high price if he gets involved with the disreputable face of science. Magnus Pyke and Patrick Moore stay very close to the professional end of this division; Desmond Morris seems to be crossing over; and from Nigel Calder’s evidence the most recent effort by Fred Hoyle seems destined to be seen in the same way. Why? After all, as Calder ...”

“... introduction by Carl Sagan, American television’s equivalent of James Burke and Patrick Moore, combining Burke’s Flash Harry glibness with Moore’s manic enthusiasm. In rhapsodic prose, Sagan sets the Grand Canyon in the perspective of terrestrial and even extra-terrestrial geology, pointing out that, a mere 350 km in length, it is puny ...”

“... peace with himself’. Another major topic in the present Letters is his love-affair with Mrs Patrick Campbell in 1912-13, and here his style strikes me as less effective. The clowning in his letters is funny enough – only Shaw could have written to his romantic beloved: ‘You turned a cold cheek to me, and, with a most wonderful pursing of your lips ...”

“... illustrious and exclusive it may be, unless, of course, it is the Garter, the Thistle, or the Patrick. A foreign aristocrat’s attitude to Orders and decorations would tend to be the opposite: he would regard something like the OBE as beneath his dignity, even though it represented much hard work on his part; while coveting an Order which denoted no ...”