“... variations on one another’s words. In his new novel, Mother’s Milk, the central character, Patrick Melrose, tries to explain to his old friend Johnny Hall, a psychoanalyst, about his rage and depression, and about their ancient familial sources. ‘I think you can afford to lose control,’ Johnny counsels ...”

“... Edward St Aubyn began writing his Patrick Melrose novels in 1988. He finished At Last, the fifth and supposedly final book in the series, late in 2010. St Aubyn is a terrific prose stylist and, end to end, these 800 or so pages, covering more than 40 years, add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour ...”

“... Something New under the Sun, begins as a classic writer-goes-to-Hollywood story. The writer is Patrick Hamlin, a forty-something with two novels and an ‘epic novella’ to his name. He’s not as successful as he thinks he should be (but his books sound turgid and dreary). His wife, Alison, has become so preoccupied with the climate crisis that she has ...”

“... to deserve the contempt of others. Explaining the way of the disciple taking the Path of Blame, Patrick Laude (a professor at Georgetown University and writer on Sufism) suggests that a typical malamati would eagerly confess along with Hamlet: ‘I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not ...”

“... his decline, but eating bananas had been the major cause of death. A lawyer called Albert T. Patrick took charge of the funeral arrangements. On the day after Rice’s death, Patrick tried to have four cheques certified. The cheques, all made out to himself, totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been signed by Rice ...”

“... of those who caught it, the doctors knew of none that would make much difference. (In this book, Patrick Cockburn concludes that Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year still offers the soundest advice for those caught in epidemics: run away.) But although this was not Cork’s first epidemic, it was the most vicious. The death toll seems to have been ...”

“... and soliloquy are perfectly gauged. Ronnie, I think, could be held to be a precursor of P for Patrick Doyle in the new novel, A Disaffection. Both works end on a possible return, on what might look like a bleak diminuendo but is really an anxiety state. There are important differences, though. Kelman stands much closer to the new hero, and much more of ...”

“... decided to give another writer he’d spotted a chance to fill the gap in the market. He wrote to Patrick O’Brian, who duly signed a contract headed: ‘Untitled novel about an 18th-century naval adventurer’.Hill’s attention had been caught by a chance reading of The Golden Ocean (1956), a novel for teenagers which made it clear that O’Brian knew his ...”

“... We owe much to your country,’ the Anglican archbishop of Uganda told Patrick Marnham shortly before being shot in 1977. ‘We need you, and not just your knowledge; we need your fellowship. Most people here know this. What we have become, you made us.’ The tragedy of this statement suffuses Fantastic Invasion, the record Patrick Marnham brought back with him from a series of visits to West and East Africa ...”

“... Paul Watkins’s novel and Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque are second books by young British writers whose work has been well-received in America, to which, together with its surrounding seas, both of these writers have been drawn. Paul Watkins used, they say, to set off from Eton for spells on an oil rig, and after graduating from Yale he fished for three years off the New England coast, where this novel of his is located ...”

“... Stalinist, alcoholic, sexually ambivalent, Patrick Hamilton had all the prerequisites of a successful Thirties writer. That his success was uneven would seem simply another sign of the times, the mark of an epoch grimly wedded to failure. His work was praised by Greene, Priestley, Lessing, Powell; but if he survives today it is for a couple of memorably macabre dramas – Rope and Gaslight – which Hamilton himself scorned as callow sensationalism ...”

“... ambiguity of the material provokes such a response – a doubt about this novel. In other novels, Patrick White has offered the reader something more obvious to fix the attention, such as Voss’s intense and dominating will. In the absence of an obvious meaning nothing so fixes the attention in The Twyborn Affair. There is a good deal of absence in this ...”

“... that it is hard to come up with much interest in her. Like Falling apart, the latest novel by Patrick White, Memoirs of Many in One, is set up as a man’s intricate filtering of a woman’s story of delusion. Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray is imagined as an old Australianised Greek woman, a friend of Patrick White ...”

“... to tower over the nation like a baron’s castle over feudal fields. It was in that period that Patrick Wright published On Living in an Old Country, a book of essays which established him as the most interesting of the young cultural critics. He drew ideas from sources as diverse as Agnes Heller and Tom Nairn; in turn, his thought was rapidly and ...”

“... the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid writing of him as a brother since my interest in him was mainly as ...”