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“... and artists warmed to him, as did taxi-drivers, policemen and women. He once said to me: ‘Patrick, you’ve got a high gloss.’ I was flattered, like some polished banister. His own story begins with particularly vivid descriptions of boyhood in Clarecastle. The sex is hilarious and the recipes are inspiring and clear. On preparing mussels: ‘If ...”

“... his use of pauses and political aspiration alike as descending directly from the same qualities in Patrick Hamilton; John Arden’s cascades of language and desire from O’Casey’s; or, to take an American example, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 from the savagery of Ring Lardner’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. Small wonder that writers from Robert Graves to ...”

“... golfers such as P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, and only a little inferior to Malcolm Lowry and Patrick Hamilton, who were golfers as well as drinkers of championship class. This devotion to sport went with a declared aversion to women and, at this stage, to sex in any form. He told Carpenter in 1911 that he was ‘still unspotted’, and so he seems ...”

“... Does life really spell itself out as starkly as this? The answer, of course, is no. But then Patrick McGrath is not a naturalistic writer. His first book, Blood and Water, was a collection of brilliant gothic pastiches and since then he has edited an anthology. The New Gothic, Dr Haggard’s Disease, like his other novels, contains some of the principal ...”

“... Agency as their pretended target at random. The Minister of Trade in charge of the Agency was Neil Hamilton, the ambitious, dashing and very right-wing Tory MP for Tatton. For at least a year reporters at the Guardian had been trying to substantiate allegations by Mohamed Al Fayed, the proprietor of Harrods, that ...”

“... manuscript of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the meeting between Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse in the Patrick Hamilton novel of that title. But he had a devoted reader there, and I believe that the most revealing piece Jeremy wrote that term was directed at Jack Wolfenden, who in 1954 had been appointed by the Home Secretary (the egregious, homophobic David ...”

“... Hugo Hamilton was born in 1953 to an Irish father and a German mother. When he was growing up, as he writes in this remarkable memoir, he spent a lot of time trying to prove that he wasn’t a Nazi. But he never could. The sight of somebody in lederhosen and an Aran sweater was irresistible to the local bullies. Later, his peers at the prestigious Coláiste Mhuire were just as intolerant ...”

“... how intemperate passions are rooted in a heavy loam of the commonplace and the customary. In Carn, Patrick McCabe describes three decades in the life of a small Irish community. Carn is a small town situated half a mile from the Irish border, a town honoured in Republican annals for the heroism of Commandant Matt Dolan, shot dead in 1922 during a raid on the ...”

“... The abject surrender of Neil Hamilton, the ‘envelope man’ who changed the law so that he could sue the Guardian for libel, deprived the nation of an exhilarating and informative court case. When the Guardian alleged that Hamilton, Tory MP for Tatton, had taken money from Mohammed AI Fayed, chairman of Harrods to lobby Parliament against a Department of Trade inquiry which eventually denounced Fayed as a liar, the cocky MP announced that he was at last going to get even with the liberal press ...”

“... same table. During the course of the next week, I was to make several similar errors. Names like Patrick White and A.D. Hope were greeted with candid derision, and nobody had heard of Clive James.* When, at one of the actual Festival’s talk-ins, I said that it was odd to find Peter Porter missing from various standard anthologies of Australian verse, I was ...”

“... Mrs Thatcher’s successor in Finchley, Hartley Booth, have left office under a moral cloud. Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith are part of a long Tory tradition. If we throw our minds back to the Thatcher age, various forms of sleaze are associated with the names of Cecil Parkinson, Nicholas Fairbairn and ...”

“... Magnet cast: for instance, we are asked to suppose that Frank Richards (his real name was Charles Hamilton, but Hughes affects not to know this), scouring Eton with a literary purpose in mind, came face to face with a boy called Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. Charles ...”

“... Mouse equipped with machine gun and tripod. There’s another machine gun among a cluster of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s sculptures. Patrick Keiller’s 2012 installation The Robinson Institute (which also involved the filmmaker trawling the Tate archives) supplies several apposite works, among them Leonard Rosoman’s 1942 ...”

“... was revealed by Doppler radar observation in 1965 and made ruthlessly public – it’s even in Patrick Moore’s 1967 edition of The Observer’s Book of Astronomy. XTL was published as a hardback in 2001. Did nobody notice? It’s not a typo and Goodwin and Gribbin both have a PhD in astronomy. Whatever the reason, the error inevitably casts something of ...”

“... 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 ...”