“... 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 ...”

“... her lack of interest in playing any important part in Irish affairs in the future. In this work, Patrick Buckland, previously known for his books on Irish Unionism, shows how weary the Titan had become of the whole Irish burden by 1921. There was not even a substantial right-wing movement (as distinct from the odd diehard) bent upon saving Ulster from the ...”

“... its depravity. It’s a pop chronicle of evil: the protagonist, a vile Wall Street broker named Patrick Bateman who inexplicably turns serial killer, is, it turns out, just your everyday fashion victim – Ellis’s version of the Nazi. Like the murderer nervously wiping away his fingerprints, Ellis engages in the meticulous erasure of any evidence of ...”

“... necessary to do any of the thousand special things that have been done there. John Major and Sir Patrick Mayhew do not like it, but one of the defining characteristics of Irish Nationalism – and Unionism, for that matter – is that it has always had a tradition of physical force. The survival of that tradition is lamentable and anachronistic, but they are ...”

“... Patrick McGinley’s pastoral parable, The Red Men, begins with Gulban Heron, rural overlord of a hotel, a shop and four sons. There is dark-haired Jack, capable, ruthless, dissolute, his father’s favourite, and there are three carrot-polled losers, the red men of the title: Cookie, a jaded man of letters, typically apt to give life a literary form and content; cynical Joey, with his fire-scarred face, who mistrusts the emotions and gives his mind to geology and shopkeeping; and Father Bosco, with his fire-damped soul, reminiscently plagued by lust and distressed by the loneliness of his calling ...”

“... the only full-length novel devoted to olfaction originates, like A Rebours, in an alien culture. Patrick Süskind’s Perfume was translated from the original German and published in Britain and America in 1986. The novel (originally put out in hardback by Hamish Hamilton) neatly partners Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant. Set in pre-Revolution France, it ...”

“... customers with a bona fide professional interest. It seems odd that the editors, Daniel Gunn and Patrick Guyomard, should get their knickers in such a twist about Sir Archibald when forty years later Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the Senior Treasury Counsel against Lady Chatterley, was still getting his in a twist about the possible evil effects of the book on his ...”

“... Does anyone remember Little Me – a fictional autobiography published by Patrick Dennis 30 years ago in mockery of the self-adulatory memoirs which gushed, as they still gush, from actor-dramatists and other multi-talented luvvies? Little Me would not only conduct the symphony he had composed for the inaugural concert in the splendid new concert hall, he was also the architect who had designed the splendid new concert hall ...”

“... and quite brilliant talent. And a talent effortlessly exercised, which is more than can be said of Patrick McGrath’s. His eponymous Spider, whose name is really Dennis, lives in Mrs Wilkinson’s boardinghouse, eats the awful food she prepares for the inmates, and keeps a journal in which he recalls his youth in this same area of London’s East End. In the ...”

“... were getting under way in October 1981, of his own supposed 38 per cent wage increase. Patrick Jenkin, the Industry Secretary, was wheeled on to tell the Commons that Edwardes drew a ‘remuneration package’ and that, over the five years of his contract, the ‘cost to the company’ of the ‘package’ was 5 per cent per year. Compound ...”

“... of the background to the current state of the IRA is knowledgeably sketched by Eamonn Mallie and Patrick Bishop. Anyone looking for startling new disclosures will be disappointed, but theirs is a solid, lucidly written account. Their judgments are shrewd and unsentimental and their analysis of the IRA of the Sixties acute. But their coverage of a number of ...”

“... With Patrick Keiller’s work a suitable place to begin would seem to be the end – specifically The End (1986), the first film by him to incorporate the subject matter and use the techniques that came to typify his mature style. Seventeen minutes long, and photographed in the autumn of 1983 by Keiller and his sometime collaborator (and full-time partner), Julie Norris, The End consists of what might be termed mises-en-scène trouvées; if by this we are to understand the fortuitous discovery by the camera’s lens of landscapes, cityscapes and their largely spectral human inhabitants ...”

“... was found in the US mailbag at 46 Lower Belgrave Street in London there has been no new evidence. Patrick Marnham’s only novelty is the evidence from Taki, the Spectator gossip-columnist, to the effect that he knew Lucky Lucan had a powerboat and had made dummy runs with an eight-stone sack to the coast. That fits with Lucan’s remarks to Greville Howard ...”

“... then died raggedly away, replaced by a tumult of weeping. W.C. Fields would be proud of her. Patrick O’Brian’s 13th story about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin – appropriately called The Thirteen-Gun Salute – is as entertaining as its predecessors. O’Brian is a master of the narrative of action, but he has sustained interest through this long ...”