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“... of life – the last resort of the artist without a true subject. In Australia, realism – what Patrick White, condemning the national literature in 1958, called the ‘dreary dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’– was the obvious method, because anything else would have seemed fancy: and White himself was one of the very few writers down ...”

“... was sometimes said, was always in the pub but never really of it. Much the same could be said of Patrick Hamilton, who was best known in his lifetime for his stage chillers Rope (1929) and Gaslight (1938), but is mostly remembered for the expert depictions of joyless interwar boozing in Hangover Square (1941) and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the ...”

“... a man with his best work far behind him, to be compared dismissively with Joyce, to be detected by Patrick Kavanagh as a journalist without a sustaining myth ‘that would carry all the stuff in his column, that would lift it onto a creative plane’, was to be cruelly caught in a half-truth. For it is the distinction of Brian O’Nolan that amongst those ...”

“... judgment and the judgment abroad arises frequently in post-colonial literatures, and the case of Patrick White illustrates its complexities. First, how ‘Australian’ is White? He was born in London but of parents who were both Australians of grazier stock. He returned to Australia during his first year of life and lived in Sydney until the age of 13. So ...”

“... before they could even reach the car door handles. We got their names soon enough – Tony Tucker, Patrick Tate and Craig Rolfe – but who were they? They were businessmen. Drugs was their business. And they were Faces, ‘Face’ being the word which, in the criminal world, denotes a successful, known professional. They had discovered, as had other ...”

“... kingdom described in great detail by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an ...”

“... Hesperus, which foundered nearby, you hear the dire weather reporting from other ballads from Sir Patrick Spens but oh these kings and captains will go forth despite. The cork-heeled shoon. The little child lashed to the mast found by Norman’s Woe with her cold corpsey lips and frozen hair. A new fear overcomes me – as it did in the Hudson and in the ...”

“... do with two madmen now, not one.’   ‘You mean Marcus is mad too?’   ‘No, he means Patrick is mad too.’   ‘What do you mean?’ It takes a moment to work out that three people are talking about two other people. They are, it emerges, the novel’s five principals; all men and each representative of some mode of knowledge or creative ...”

“... legends about Irish saints fasting against God, including one about the chief of them all, St Patrick, which presents him as refusing to descend from his now-famous mountain, Croagh Patrick, until God had agreed to all his admirable demands on behalf of his beloved Irish converts. After that, one fasted for God, and ...”

“... When​ Jean-Patrick Manchette was asked about his first encounter with detective fiction, he mentioned a scene from Black Wings Has My Angel by the American writer Elliott Chaze. Originally published in 1953, this obscure lovers-on-the-run thriller was only available, until recently, in French translation.*She was sitting on the floor, naked, in a skitter of green bills … scooping up handfuls of the green money and dropping it on top of her head so that it came sliding down along the cream-coloured hair, slipping down along her shoulders and body ...”

“... which this same blurb rails in its insistence on ‘new times’ bringing ‘new images’. Patrick Skene Catling’s ‘The Right Spot’ is the tale of an American professor of geology, Kevin J. O’Driscoll, who retires with his wife to a quiet corner of the old sod – West Cork, to be exact – where they buy a charmingly ethnic cottage. There’s ...”

“... Board of the newly-formed Australia Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have ...”

“... is too little with us – that all issues are reduced to the level of the parish pump. Yet, as Patrick Kavanagh warned, Irish writers turn outward at their peril. Disgusted by the loud quarrels of his Monaghan neighbours, he wrote:That was the year of the Munich bother. WhichWas more important? I inclinedTo lost my faith in Ballyrish and GortinTill ...”

“... There are two points to make about this meeting. The then secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Patrick Mayhew, insists that he didn’t know about it. But that doesn’t mean Fred was flying solo. The Duddy archive includes a fax sent by Fred to Duddy in August 1993 which strongly suggests Fred had some level of clearance to meet the IRA in spite of what ...”

“... so long has never been better expressed than in the broodings of Kingsley Amis’s schoolteacher Patrick Standish, as he reacts to ‘taking, or rather hauling, the Junior Sixth through not nearly enough of In Marcum Antonium II. For a man so long and so thoroughly dead it was remarkable how much boredom, and also how precise an image of nasty silliness ...”