“... supplant exotic evils and heroism springs up in surprising places. There was never any doubt that Patrick Brontë was a man of intelligence, principles and courage: it has long been known that he insisted on sleeping in Branwell’s room during his son’s horrific last days lest, drunk and outrageous, Branwell commit some terrible act of violence. Until ...”

“... but also with a sense that these alien terms were threatening the Gaelic which embedded them. Patrick Collinson has complained (LRB, 3 April) about ‘the lack of relations’ between historians and literary critics working on Elizabethan England. Just as Early Modern historians of the ‘British and Irish problem’ need to think more intently about ...”

“... it seems to generate its own light. The napkins’ beautiful, useless folds. The Summer of Love of Patrick Troughton’s puckish Dr Who of the dark-wood-and-mullion-doored bureau and the coal bunker, dwarfed by my father’s shed of my canary-yellow candlewick bedspread of the dog at our back door, waiting for bones; its hind leg broken on Pentregethin Rd of ...”

“... consisting of a collection of mud and rough stone huts. He was tough, serious and intelligent. Patrick Seale does not tell us much about his subject’s personal tastes – only occasional asides about his sweet tooth or the fact that he was ‘apparently uninterested in sexual experiment’ – but he emphasises the dogged qualities developed through his ...”

“... transformation. It meant, for example, the coming of the book and of building in stone. As Patrick Wormald suggests, these are changes the significance of which should be understood by an age which has itself seen the advent of the microchip and pre-stressed concrete. In government, in art and in literature the Anglo-Saxons showed astonishingly ...”

“... In their Introduction to the Picador Book of the New Gothic, Patrick McGrath and Bradford Morrow proposed a familiar kind of progress myth to help us find our way around the New Gothic; the old, or rather, original Gothic being by definition a genre in which the protagonists lost their way in horror or deranged bewilderment ...”

“... were three thousand people living in ‘their’ country; in fact there were fifteen thousand. Patrick Sellar, the estate manager before Suther, called them ‘barbarous hordes’. William Young, Sellar’s partner as estate factor, called them ‘a set of savages’. The tenants in the western district of Assynt were described by the ...”

“... is written from further within the system, but explores its cul-de-sacs no less relentlessly. Patrick Doyle is a teacher who gets his class to repeat after him: We are being fenced in by the teachers We are being fenced in by the teachers at the behest of a dictatorship government at the behest of a dictatorship government in explicit simulation ...”

“... north of the Limpopo and no shit.’ It is only revealed on page 170 that the liberal Father Patrick is black. The Special Branch villain has his number: ‘Oh you’re a clever coon,’ he tells Patrick. ‘All those books you read. Max Weber. Karl Marx. Religion and the Rise of – what was it the rise of?’ (My ...”

“... on all approaches to poetry not in keeping with the realities of the day. In that year, 1941, Patrick Kavanagh was writing a 757-line poem on the charmlessness of Irish country life, which nevertheless manages to encompass a good deal of its pungency: The potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move Along the side-fall of the hill ... Austin Clarke ...”

“... Patrick Modiano’s fiction is intricately caught up in time, as he himself says. ‘The great, the inevitable subject of the novel, is always . . . time.’ And more interestingly, less portentously: ‘I had the mania of looking back, always that feeling of something lost, not like paradise, but certainly lost ...”

“... Patrick deWitt​ is the sort of writer you imagine checking his emails on an old desktop computer in the library. His five deceptively simple novels suggest pleasant, old-fashioned things. They hinge on traditional plot devices – misunderstandings, a letter delivered or undelivered, a chance meeting. There is no modern technology here ...”

“... occasion of new sequences of paintings. He became a popular provider of book jackets (C.P Snow and Patrick White, for example), and of stage sets for ballet and opera. The Queen bought his pictures, and he was knighted and awarded the OM. Kenneth Clark wrote an introduction to a monograph on Nolan’s work, and Nolan went to Sweden to accept ...”

“... No one overwrites quite like Patrick McGrath. In a crowded field, he must be British fiction’s most prodigious overwriter. He made his name writing intense, florid novels about ‘wild delusions, ungovernable passions’, ‘insanity and obsessive sexual love’ (his words). But in Port Mungo he has written a book so lush, so fruity, so gorgeous – so in love with Romance and Passion – that his own back catalogue pales into understatement ...”

“... Here are two books about the relationship of the English to their past. According to Patrick Wright, England is a reactionary society burdened by a false mystique of national identity. To dissolve that mystique must be one of the first priorities of democratic socialists in establishing an alternative society with a renewed faith in its capacity for progress ...”