“... came across his own uncle’s name in a newspaper many years ago. The man in question was Private Patrick Downey, also of Limerick, who was shot the day after Boxing Day 1915, near Salonica. Officially he was 19, but he may well have lied about his age to get into the forces. He was shot for refusing to fall in for a fatigue and then to put on his hat. The ...”

“... portraits of himself and Patricia Preece. Timothy Hyman’s catalogue essay (both his essay and Patrick Wright’s add a great deal to the exhibition’s success) is marked by an ability to sort out the seriously impressive and the absurd in Spencer’s work, without failing to see the absurdity of some of the seriousness and vice versa. He is surely right ...”

“... Studies; last year saw the publication of four epics: Michael Cunningham’s, Flesh and Blood, Patrick Gale’s The Facts of Life, Ethan Mordden’s How Long Has This Been Going On? And Felice Picano’s Like People in History. These last four reveal the strengths and weaknesses in this burgeoning subgenre. The cover line for Felice Picano’s Like People ...”

“... The publication of Patrick Collinson’s The Religion of Protestants is a stirring event in the rediscovery of Early Modern England. Unmistakably the work of a historian who has reflected on his subject for the better part of a working lifetime, the book consists of six wide-ranging essays which were originally delivered as the Ford Lectures when Professor Collinson visited Oxford in 1979, and which have now been revised, expanded and tightened – although the speculative tone of the lecture-hall has been appropriately retained ...”

“... its two chief characters, who mainly share the narration, are continuations of the late-Fifties Patrick and Jenny from Take a girl like you, thus giving the story its own recessive and wistful casting-back posture. In addition, though a light and easy and genuinely funny book, Difficulties with girls has a good deal of commerce with violence, darkness and ...”

“... that they ‘present an unpleasing exterior’. The ‘two Scottish doctors’, Alexander and Patrick Russell, explained in 1792 that it was particularly the height of the walls which made the streets appear so ‘gloomy’: ‘little better than alleys winding among the melancholy walls of nunneries’. The people of Aleppo, on the other hand, were ...”

“... ability to use smart writing to make a teen plot seem a true account of the place she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s more fitfully imaginative book lacks, but both have virtues which come directly from the fact that the substantial historical scaffolds which they have erected give their ...”

“... to William Blake – nevertheless, I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End. Patrick White says somewhere that there is an intangible difference in the air of places where there has been intense suffering, that you can never get rid of the memory that pain imprints on the atmosphere. London’s river runs through Downriver like a ...”

“... Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage undertaken by thousands of Irish men and women each year. For three days they fast and pray, deprive themselves of sleep, and walk barefoot round the station ‘beds’ – circles of rough stones said to ...”

“... Alfred Aloysius Watson was five years senior to Conan Doyle at Stonyhurst; that the eminent Sir Patrick Heron Watson was almost his contemporary in the Edinburgh Medical School; and that Sir Thomas Watson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society some ten years before William Budd, Conan Doyle’s partner in general practice as a young man. A Sherlock ...”

“... patient, it holds out against every effort of good will. Nothing Joyce said about it is much help. Patrick Parrinder’s book is a fairly straightforward introduction to Joyce, based on two congenially related emphases. The first is that Joyce’s work as a whole, and Ulysses in particular, feature ‘a poetics of the body’. In a letter of 1921, Joyce told ...”

“... get the utmost funniness out of it. Hughes’s narrator is an overweight government employee named Patrick Weymouth, incompletely divorced from his wife and unsatisfactorily entangled with his secretary, whose present task – rather vaguely defined – is to draft a report on the state of culture in modern Britain, with emphasis on current children’s ...”

“... I wonder how many culture-pilgrims have journeyed to Martinique since Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992, to see whether a shanty town of that name really exists. The novel may be a lush documentary or it may be a historical romance: we can’t be sure. In any case, it is likely to change the way we think about the lives and circumstances of millions of people living on the periphery of large cities in underdeveloped parts of the world ...”

“... beginning with John Foxe and William Camden in her own time, and extending across the centuries to Patrick Collinson and David Starkey in our own, have examined Elizabeth’s reign from a variety of angles, analysing its various subtle strategies and compromises, attempting to evaluate what it achieved. Dobson and Watson, by contrast, are concerned less with ...”

“... Brunswick Town Hall, an inner suburb of Melbourne. It was to be addressed by the Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson, on the theme of reconciliation. Knowing the unpunctuality of left-wing events, I put off driving down Sydney Road until a quarter of an hour before the talk was due to start: a bad mistake. It took twenty minutes to get through the queues and find ...”