“... historical novel in him, should he care to write it. For In the Skin of a Lion he takes as hero Patrick Lewis, a second-generation Canadian of rooted British origins. The opening sections relate Patrick’s early life on an Ontario farm in the second decade of the century. Among all the vivid first impressions of ...”

“... the girls kiss the lips of a statue commemorating a famous alumna known as ‘the dead author’.K Patrick’s first novel embraces and then toys with our expectations of the lesbian romance. The matron, new to England from Australia, is not frail or consumptive but self-possessed and butch: when she looks in the bathroom mirror, wearing a binder and ...”

“... city of Berlin, in the year 2003, two young people sat down to dinner. Their names were Sophie and Patrick.’ These two, it turns out, are merely the offspring of two of the novel’s main characters, whose stories Sophie proceeds to tell: ‘Come with me, then, Patrick. Let’s go backwards. Backwards in time, all the way ...”

“... down another field, diagonally, this time accompanied by a blue tractor. This pairing of views in Patrick Keiller’s 2010 film Robinson in Ruins – glimpsed again as part of his current installation at Tate Britain (on display until 14 October) – is almost too typical to be true and must, among other things, be a joke at his own expense. Since the early ...”

“... of Sartrean abuse, which made permanent the breach between Camus and their author. Even now, Patrick McCarthy regards L’Homme Révolté as not merely Camus’s ‘worst book but one that did him great harm’ – ‘yet another chapter in the “God-that-failed” saga’. That, I think, is unfair. Unlike Arthur Koestler, Camus was not performing a ...”

“... Neighbours help one another. Ruttledge has been building a shed, but he needs the help of Patrick Ryan, and Patrick, who works all over the country, comes and goes when he wills, and his comings are unpredictable. It takes an event of great magnitude to bring him Ruttledge’s way again – a death will do it ...”

“... me: Still, I’d say $500 wouldn’t be too bad, wouldn’t you? This is a typical anecdote about Patrick Kavanagh, touching as it does on his unproductiveness (‘the ex-poet’), his peculiar connection to Yeats, his prickliness. Kavanagh was born in 1904 in the townland of Mucker in the parish of Inniskeen, County Monaghan. At 13 he left school to work for ...”

“... in 2013? With Welsh being the best-known chronicler of underclass addiction, and St Aubyn in his Patrick Melrose books documenting the ravages of the same habits in a more privileged milieu, there’s a hint of condescension here. There are open seams in the plotting. Katherine’s besotted editor, Alan, works on her new novel, Consequences, till the last ...”

“... entertainer’.(Dickens was stigmatised with the same term by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition.) Patrick Parrinder has been opposing such anti-Wellsian prejudice for the best part of a quarter of a century. His opposition takes the form of scholarly works which patiently mount the case for critical respect. Parrinder’s contributions include the Critical ...”

“... Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the ...”

“... Patrick Miller’s first iron vessel, the world’s First steamship is swanning across Dalswinton Loch. A landscape painter, Alexander Naysmith Perches on deck beside his good friend, Robert Bums. It’s a calm, clear morning. The painter will later invent The compression rivet, and work out the axial arrangement Between propeller and engine ...”

“... seen from a marginal comment scrawled by a racist reader in a copy of the first (1966) edition of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece held by the Cambridge University Library. Where Leigh Fermor refers to the modern Greek language as being the ‘undisputed heir of ancient Greek’, the anonymous scribbler has added: ‘Nonsense. It ...”

“... of the first four volumes of the series covered earlier critics that fall within the scope of Patrick Parrinder’s study. Authors and Authority in turn is an expansion of a 1977 book that stopped with the beginning of the 20th century. Now nearly twice its original length, it comes all the way down to the Yale Deconstructionists, the American proponents ...”

“... It attested to Clark’s standing as the representative spokesman (especially after the death of Patrick White a few months before) of a certain kind of Australian radical-democratic nationalism. Had the conservative parties been in power, the funeral rites would have been rather different: Liberal Party grandees would not have crowded the cathedral. As ...”

“... Several pages seemed to have been mauled by cats, as I later found to have been the case. Patrick Thursfield was instantly ‘caught up by the sweep of the story’, and this English edition is the result. The first book, especially, reads like a discovery in the attic, with the strangeness natural to translation, and the careless misprints of a hasty ...”