“... any remaining dun-coloured realism to a few pockets.’ ‘Dun-coloured realism’ derives from Patrick White’s contemptuous description of the local literary scene as he found it on his return from Europe in 1948. White – the only antipodean to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on Bail’s shelf of severe masters – is the big ...”

“... in Australia recall themes from the poets, novelists and painters of earlier decades, including Patrick White (Riders in the Chariot) and Sidney Nolan (the Ned Kelly series). The title-poem conjures with the idea of a bird species that may or may not exist – ‘If at all, then fringe dwellers/of the centre’, like poetry, an epiphenomenon of life in the ...”

“... approach the Revival and the Easter Rising, offering some fascinating pages on the immolation of Patrick Pearse. Dominating the book, not surprisingly, is the figure of Yeats, although these authors have succeeded here in turning back on its feet that inverted perspective of most British and American literary study which makes the Easter Rising a minor ...”

“... British heritage industry is a loathsome collection of theme parks and dead values.’ For Patrick Wright, it is ‘part of the self-fulfilling culture of national decline’. As their country’s importance in the world diminishes, the British turn to their past for emotional compensation. How long, asks Robert Hewison, will it be before the whole ...”

“... even now. The subject clearly fatigues and irritates her. A part of her, like the ghastly girl in Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, was and is secretly gleeful about Fascism. Dalley describes as ‘unusual’ her attendance at a Hyde Park rally in 1935, where she threw up her right hand in a Nazi salute while Clement Attlee was addressing a mild-as-milk ...”

“... was revealed by Doppler radar observation in 1965 and made ruthlessly public – it’s even in Patrick Moore’s 1967 edition of The Observer’s Book of Astronomy. XTL was published as a hardback in 2001. Did nobody notice? It’s not a typo and Goodwin and Gribbin both have a PhD in astronomy. Whatever the reason, the error inevitably casts something of ...”

“... whether better alternative structures were possible. After all, the urban consequences of what Patrick Geddes christened the ‘neotechnic’ age were international in effect. Did German, Italian or American cities, with their constitutional guarantees, stronger civic elites but consequent rigidities, do better or worse in the face of the 20th-century ...”

“... In September 1848, Louis-Napoleon returned from his long exile in London armed with a startling blueprint for what he was later to call his ‘plan for the embellishment of Paris’. It consisted of a colour-coded roll of parchment representing the soon-to-be Emperor’s provisional thoughts on the renovation of the capital’s thoroughfares. This was the Urtext of the drastic transformations to the material and social fabric of Paris that were to take place during most of the Second Empire (the term ‘transformation’ was used for the first time in connection with city-planning during this period ...”

“... allowances for himself; he valued circumspection more than abstinence. He admired the journalist Patrick O’Donovan, at the time an officer in the Irish Guards, who ‘while he stood at the salute of the King and Queen in the Victory Parade, the upper part of his body out of his tank, his soldier servant was fellating him below.’ But he distinguished ...”

“... particularly prone to re-create their own lives.’ Among recently exposed fantasists, he lists Patrick O’Brian, Bruce Chatwin, Laurie Lee and Jeffrey Archer, all writers for whom a legend as man of action was a large part of their stock in trade. The South African poet Roy Campbell, who was a world-class liar, influenced Van der Post at an impressionable ...”

“... by the most prominent left-wing commentator in Britain, a Corbyn insider. Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have assembled their book from an impressive array of interviews with key members of Corbyn’s team, as well as with others implacably opposed to his leadership. Where they primarily document the project’s disintegration between the 2017 and ...”

“... the means of self-definition provided by sub-cultures. In The Historical Meanings of Work, Patrick Joyce and his contributors concern themselves with ‘work as a cultural activity, rather than simply an economic one’. Joyce argues that the idea of ‘work in general’ as a ‘discrete activity in a distinct “economic” realm’ derives merely ...”

“... the background to it. On the News reports of Tony Snowdon’s death. I first met him in 1968 when Patrick Garland brought him backstage with Princess Margaret after Forty Years On. A friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her ...”

“... when he was 18. It’s never been translated, but according to Simenon’s excellent biographer Patrick Marnham it’s a would-be humorous story about his home town, Liège, ‘partly set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons’. Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote 150 or so pulp books, mainly of ...”

“... than likely ways. Rose Macaulay collected soap and Storm Jameson socks and blankets for Spain; Patrick Hamilton deserted satirical realism for dystopia and allegory; Stephen Spender meandered Forward from Liberalism, crabwise; Sybil Thorndike joined the board of the Daily Worker; Dylan Thomas insisted that his ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ must first ...”