“... 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 ...”

“... ended with ‘To be continued’. The second with ‘To be concluded’. But the third book of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous walk from the Hook of Holland to ‘Constantinople’ was never completed. He died two years ago, rewriting and correcting and adding and tweaking almost to the end. The manuscript, some versions of it handwritten, some typed ...”

“... the good friends we were. Then he was there, in the pub next door eyes that bubbled and popped, a Patrick Mower look-a-like before look-a-likes were the thing. Glimpses of haired skin through shirt buttons, Christmas Old Spice, the definite nod in his eyes. He declared me his, enforced with love-kissed punches and shadowing. A strong lover, who wept the ...”

“... the hangman or by grave-robbing. Before his death another, almost contemporary, ‘Irish Giant’, Patrick Cotter, knowing that the anatomists would be itching to get hold of his corpse, prescribed measures to prevent the theft of his body from the Roman Catholic chapel in Bristol where he was to be buried. There were to be three coffins, the outer two made of ...”

“... That Patrick O’Brian would write a good book about the early life of Joseph Banks was to be expected. Banks combined the enthusiasm and practical competence of one of O’Brian’s fictional heroes, Jack Aubrey, with the passion for natural history of another, Stephen Maturin. Moreover O’Brian’s accounts in his novels of 18th-century seamanship are, like Tolstoy’s battle pieces, better historical description than most historians manage: it was clear that the variety of incident in Banks’s voyage to the Great South Sea with Cook, which matches that of any fictional adventure, was a subject made for him ...”

“... to embody these feelings is an elderly, one-eyed woman, a singer of ballads, who resembles, in Patrick Creagh’s translation, an early version of Yeats’s Crazy Jane: Woman whose face is worn and green As pebbles in a mountain stream, Tears of love have cracked your skin! This woman rarely appears in Les Amours jaunes. She stands somewhere at the very ...”

“... the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence.* There’s a world of difference between the phrase ‘you’re altogether ...”

“... who would create the new dance born from the new music’. She thought that her young son Patrick might be that ‘one’. Photography, too, was suspect, and in many photos she wears an expression of placid forbearance: the smile of Mona Lisa under eyes that are appraising. Her portrait and the sensation of her dancing would be rendered by countless ...”

“... for the decline in people working on the land in Europe are stark. In Remembering Peasants, Patrick Joyce reports that in 1950 nearly half the population of Spain were agricultural workers. By 1980 the figure was 14.5 per cent; by 2020 it was less than 5 per cent. In France the proportion of people working in agriculture was 23 per cent in 1950 and 3 ...”

“... for this volume by the publishers certainly exists. The book’s concern and aims are stated by Patrick Wormald in the foreword: ‘The mutual interaction of intellectual ideas and social realities is arguably history’s most abiding theme. If this book takes that theme any further, it will be a proper tribute to a historian who never allowed pupils or ...”

“... until everyone felt the presence of the devil on the doorstep each day, just waiting his chance. Patrick Wright evokes Cold War stereotypes very concretely, beginning in Fulton, Missouri, where in 1946 Churchill first claimed to discern the curtain that had ‘descended from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’. His speech aimed at creating a ...”

“... when this volume begins, Betjeman was feeling the anxiety of the ageing writer, well expressed by Patrick Kavanagh, a friend of his from wartime Dublin: Give us another poem, he said Or they will think your muse is dead; Another middle-aged departure Of Apollo from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with ...”

“... the outposts of empire, more like the British in India than like the magnates who entertained Patrick Leigh-Fermor when he passed through the Balkans. There was Italian blood on the father’s side and Romanian-Greek and Irish on the mother’s. Rezzori is very much concerned with blood and racial inheritance in all his books. The concern itself appears ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... An old biological joke (at least I think it is old) has it that the patron saint of ecology is St Patrick. If new species can arise from a predecessor without the need for a geographical barrier (sympatrically, to use the technical term and to explain the joke, feeble as it is), then it is much easier to understand why there can be hundreds of related species ...”