“... its heroisms, weaknesses and absurdities – excited Farrell’s fantasy. In the same way, Patrick O’Brian, a similar and at least as great a talent, though not specifically an Oriental specialist, has to have a ship and the sea for his marvellously delicate and humorous fantasies set in Napoleon’s day. These are emphatically not adventure ...”

“... own collections of the stuff) or by condescending arts programmers prepared to suffer a ten-minute Patrick Hamilton retrospective – as long as it goes out at midnight. Lowlife fictions, closer to the action than any scissors-and-paste ‘true crime’ anthology, inform us, involve us, excite us, return us to a lost sense of our own mortality. Here the gangs ...”

“... Red, Red Rose’. While Paterson’s non-bard is wee enough to fit in a matchbox, Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg offer a bard of Victorian amplitude. The Canongate Burns runs to over a thousand pages, many of them by Noble and Hogg. A lot less stylish, their introduction alone is almost as long as Paterson’s whole book. They feel duty-bound to remark on ...”

“... in The Busconductor Hines (1984); Tammas, the young gambler of A Chancer (1985); a schoolteacher, Patrick Doyle, in A Disaffection (1989); Sammy, the ex-convict blinded by the police, in the Booker Prize-winning How Late It Was, How Late (1994); Jeremiah, a wayfaring Scot in America, in You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004); and now Kieron ...”

“... government’s suspicion that none of the Unionists could be trusted. Even now, Godson says, Patrick Mayhew, Northern Ireland secretary at the time, describes Trimble’s performance at Drumcree as ‘undoubtedly triumphalist’. He aroused great hostility in nationalist Ireland and among what Godson calls ‘mainland progressive opinion’, which helped ...”

“... and a fair share of devotion. Two recent series of French novels illustrate these points. Patrick Rambaud’s polished trilogy, of which two volumes (The Battle, The Retreat) have so far appeared in English, treats the emperor with fascinated scorn. The three parts move from the horrific 1809 battle of Essling, in which 40,000 men died in 30 hours, to ...”

“... to each successive generation in Scotland. On the day, however, it provoked hilarity, and Patrick Hume of Marchmont’s equally famous one-line put-down: ‘Behold he dreamed, but lo! when he awoke, he found it was a dream.’ In truth the short-range advantages turned out to be themselves disconcertingly far off. As Scott put it sourly, after Union ...”

“... on (though there may continue to be minor alarums, such as the recent spat over the entry for Patrick O’Brian). Nonetheless, a not dissimilar kind of sleep-disturbing responsibility fell on its editor, and the project was fortunate to find the ideal man for the job in the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the task in ...”

“... I suspect that there has been a continuous tradition from the great Victorians right through to Patrick O’Brian ...”

“... of this survived independence, it gradually gave way to the plainer, more disenchanted idiom of Patrick Kavanagh, or the self-parodic minimalism of Samuel Beckett, so fearful of writing Hiberno-English that he ceased to write in English altogether. Colm Tóibín’s austere, monkish prose, in which everything is exactly itself and redolent of nothing ...”

“... same table. During the course of the next week, I was to make several similar errors. Names like Patrick White and A.D. Hope were greeted with candid derision, and nobody had heard of Clive James.* When, at one of the actual Festival’s talk-ins, I said that it was odd to find Peter Porter missing from various standard anthologies of Australian verse, I was ...”

“... of The Triflers was written in the 1920s as a possible ‘come-back’ for the aging star, Mrs Patrick Campbell. It now had only three acts, butler and footmen had been replaced by the telephone, and the ducal conservatory had become a streamlined modern interior belonging to a young man called the Honourable ‘Daisy’ Vane. ‘Decorations by ...”

“... are only removed when they cease to entertain – or when the actors themselves have had enough. Patrick Duffy, fed up with playing Bobby, ‘the dumbest, most gullible guy in the world’, engineered the character’s death. He now makes adverts which for a six-figure sum require him to say, ‘That’ll be all,’ to a ...”

“... attack on Libya. St John-Stevas did not accuse of cowardice those who objected to the attack. Sir Patrick Wall attended to that, referring to Europe’s ‘pussyfootedness’ in combating terrorism, and claiming that ‘if we had refused the United States request, the call for Fortress America would have grown, with very dangerous consequences for ...”

“... conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins when he had finished a somewhat similar job for Hamlyn. Both Urdang and T.H. Long were earlier on the Random House Dictionary. All very cosy. But while it desirably makes for shared knowledge and a solid ...”