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“... of Hemingway’s birth. The published book is a homunculus of the original, created by his son Patrick out of a manuscript twice as long. Billed as ‘A Fictional Memoir’, it falls roughly into two parts, her-and-his acts of initiation. First, Mary Hemingway learns lion-killing, pursuing a 400-lb beast for three months. After she leaves camp for ...”

“... His choice was inspired: he decided to send Mr Justice Devlin to the Old Bailey for that session. Patrick Devlin had been an outstanding practitioner at the commercial Bar, his manner about as remote as it could be from the fashionable knock-about jury practice of Melford Stevenson, or the political world of Manningham-Buller. Devlin had been appointed to the ...”

“... turn down Yeats’s volume, evade his peremptory rhetoric. Seamus Heaney has disclosed that it was Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry that showed him what might still be done: though I think it must also have indicated the limits of that achievement. Flann O’Brien had to rid his mind of Joyce before he could do his proper work: the riddance is At ...”

“... Simone de Beauvoir had to change her original title for When things of the spirit come first, because it had been unexpectedly pre-empted by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The new title which she picked (Quand prime le spirituel) was a simple variant of the other (Primauté du Spirituel), and the difference has in any case become insignificant in the English translation ...”

“... he sees pilgrims performing ritual progresses on bare knees round and round the cairns on Croagh-Patrick, with priests urging on the blood-dripping laggards. Yet he believes it is the threat of the weekly Confessional that keeps pretty Irish girls so ‘highly moral’. An indefatigable and cheerful reporter, he visits gaols, asylums and poorhouses and finds ...”

“... for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more likely to think of themselves as ...”

“... than she gave. She spent a week in a nursing-home because she’d been drinking too much; and told Patrick Leigh Fermor that Diana Cooper had rung her there ‘and said, “Hear you’re in a home for inebriates”: she then came along, seduced all and sundry and left after booking a bed to die in; my prestige much improved by the visitation.’ When in 1981 ...”

“... bullet in his chest, he lit a cigarette to deceive his men as to the seriousness of the wound. Patrick Shaw Stewart, who reminisced longingly of hot baths and starched shirts, wrote: ‘Every time I remember that nearly all my friends are dead I take some form of imaginary morphia, and promise myself work or love or letters, or fall back on the comfortable ...”

“... group’ of academics. This consisted of Lord Robbins, Sir Philip Morris, Sir Patrick Linstead and Sir Keith (now Lord) Murray, the UGC Assessor with the Committee. Like every other commentator Mr Carswell judges Morris, the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol, to have been the most powerful member of the group. His summary of Morris’s attitude ...”

“... and Jimmy [Goldsmith] from beyond the grave. I hope they are happy now.’ When Ingrams and Patrick Marnham wrote the story, after Elwes’s memorial service, they widened it considerably and turned it, in Ingrams’s words, into an ‘attack’. Lifting a line from my Sunday Times article that mistakenly reported Goldsmith at a lunch with the ‘Lucan ...”

“... entered his bedroom to discover him pacing up and down stark naked, dictating to his secretary, Patrick Kinna. Churchill said: ‘You see Mr President, I have nothing to hide from you.’ On learning in October 1944 that the future of King Zog of Albania was in serious doubt, Churchill sent a note to Eden: ‘Another King gone down the drain!’ A banquet ...”

“... bear an odd resemblance to popular naval romances of our own time, like those of C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian; for poetry in the 17th century was expected to cater for all a public’s literary appetites, and usually did so very well, whether it was war in Heaven or bombardment on the high seas. Sylvester’s version of the French poet Du Bartas is much ...”

“... The Glasgow art scene was ‘a notoriously tough, hard-drinking, back-biting milieu’, Patrick Elliott writes in the thoughtful study that accompanied this summer’s show of Eardley’s work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. It was a world not keen on artists born in England, or gay people. The Glasgow Art Club ‘did not admit women ...”

“... agencies: how far should they allow their informers to go in order to protect their secret role? Patrick Walker, the senior MI5 officer in Northern Ireland (later appointed head of the agency) drew up a report in 1980 instructing the RUC to place spying ahead of solving crimes. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which hears cases brought against the security ...”

“... on smells, and of course there is Proust’s madeleine in the related area of taste (as well as Patrick Süskind’s 1985 blockbuster Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), but it’s rare for a memoir or literary work to focus on smell. By chance, however, when I started Schlögel’s book I was in the middle of reading a memoir published fifteen years or so ...”