“... 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 ...”

“... courageous, though not always as successful. I find it hard to enjoy the florid extravagances of Patrick White’s Voss, while respecting the attempt to make word match fact. Xavier Herbert tried to meet size with size, insisting that his Poor Fellow My Country, close on a million words, be published in a single hardback volume which one day may kill a frail ...”

“... a developing process which aims at the establishment of a full cultural identity. Unfortunately, Patrick Buckland has not meditated on these questions and his title, A History of Northern Ireland, is offered without irony. Although Buckland is more of a memorialist than a serious historian, he has performed a valuable service in such works as The Factory of ...”

“... talk of this fabulous hybrid called the ‘Euronovel’, of which the next memorable example was Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. The Last World, a short and cheerless fictionalisation of Ovid’s years in exile by the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr, was a bestseller throughout most of Europe while doing poorly in this country, but any thoughts that this ...”

“... work otherwise. No pain, no gain. Feel the burn. Actually, I’d rather not, and the blessed Patrick Wall, neuroscientist and pain doctor, wishes it to be known that pain is almost entirely useless and good for nothing but getting rid of. He cites cancer pain, with the impatience of one who is suffering it himself, as the apogee of pointlessness. Cancer ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... of the BWMA’s honorary members – there’s Jilly Cooper, Peter Hitchens, Norris McWhirter, mad Patrick Moore – includes the name of the universally adored J.K. Rowling OBE. Is this not taking the antique Englishness of Harry Potter just a little too far? But then I remember that the ‘feasts’ served up at Hogwarts boarding school are of ‘roast ...”

“... fear and despise – and have often underestimated. These events came too late for inclusion in Patrick Cockburn’s book, but they follow the pattern he skilfully sets out in this complex account of the emergence of Muqtada al-Sadr, whom he sees as ‘the most important and surprising figure to emerge in Iraq since the US invasion’. Unusually among ...”

“... it to be shown on TV. The documentary opened at an independent cinema in Paris in April 1971. Patrick Modiano’s Occupation novels, first published around that time and republished last year as a single-volume trilogy in English translation following Modiano’s Nobel Prize, portray a world in which it is hard to distinguish between collaboration and ...”

“... in Lausanne, where he himself died in September 1989.In the introduction to this admirable life Patrick Marnham points out that one of the difficulties confronting Simenon’s biographer is that, though there is a mass of autobiographical material, the accounts are often contradictory and self-confessedly unreliable. On the other hand, the key to ...”

“... the world slowed down, physical sensations overwhelmed him. He had infiltrated the pages of Patrick Kavanagh’s Green Fool, but the lyricism was spattered with ancient brutalities, bedridden bachelors, mud-slow policemen, bicycles, stone fields – and, always, the drink. Attending him on the farm, as in the city, never further than the end of the ...”

“... In the dismal mid-Seventies Patrick Cosgrave, later to be Margaret Thatcher’s adviser and biographer, took me to a Friday luncheon at the old Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street. Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts ...”

“... the only person of that name associated with Throgmorton Street. Under cross-examination by Sir Patrick Hastings, however, Mr Blennerhasset admitted that he did not play golf, did not play with a Yo-Yo and had never been in a lunatic asylum. Not making much progress on the confusion of identity argument, Blennerhasset then called one of his partners into ...”

“... Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. He was 19, an engaging lad, especially attractive to aristocrats who lived in castles and had similarly disposed friends further along the way. His inspiration for these peregrinations was ...”

“... no one, hurting no one’. At last he had found a conquest of which this could be said. Patrick French deserves congratulation for telling the tale of this richly emblematic though chronically miscalculated life so dashingly. He keeps the lines of the story uncluttered and concentrates on Younghusband the man, which works well. He avoids derision. I ...”