“... of the Abbey and Radio Eireann. The other was the marginalised pub culture of Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, in which writers accepted their isolation and took refuge in drink, dark satire and glorious bouts of excoriation. O’Faolain was too much an intellectual rebel to embrace the former course, too much a personal ...”

“... and topographical sweep make the poem seem almost like a fragmented and extremely compacted Patrick White novel; and it is not always easy to follow. It is technically inventive, a quasi-cinematic exercise in sudden cross-cutting and the talented mimicry of a wide range of Australian voices and accents: but I find the rise and swell of Murray’s free ...”

“... Kings in the Broadway musical, Shuffle along. In 1922 he had gone to England to appear in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s production of Voodoo. There is something diagnostic in those titles, ‘Voodoo’, ‘Taboo’. They sound like perfumes, expressing as they do the same white exotic fantasies of primeval passion. Robeson couldn’t help it if his stage ...”

“... as a sacrificial and redeeming act – his rhetoric from late in 1915 was increasingly that of Patrick Pearse. This is a dimension Morgan might have incorporated more tellingly into his analysis; again, the work of Newsinger could have been discussed. However, Morgan does bring out clearly the extent of Connolly’s pro-Germanism from 1914-16. Connolly in ...”

“... milieu which nourished this remarkable writer. For instance, Bold mentions that MacDiarmid knew Patrick Geddes, the Edinburgh polymath and pioneer of modern town planning. But no attention is paid to MacDiarmid’s own suggestion that Geddes’s literary magazine the Evergreen inspired the Scottish Chapbook. In the 1890s Geddes had espoused a Scots ...”

“... university official bullying any dawdlers. We line up finally before the Vice-Chancellor, Patrick Neill, who looks about as lively as the mercury in a thermometer. He tips his hat, and twenty minutes later I’m heading back down the M40. London, 16 April. A letter from the director of the Thorndike Theatre at Leatherhead, where they are producing my ...”

“... Taylor, Sharon Tate, Brigitte Bardot and Liza Minnelli, slept with Celia Birtwell, David Hockney, Patrick Prockter, Wayne Sleep and assorted tall, thin models: was he the one who had a life? But the later fallen, paranoid speed-freak Ossie, who fished in the wishing-well in Holland Park for the price of a packet of ten cigarettes, and cruised Hampstead Heath ...”

“... for ironic quotation – the casserole or bunch of roses which appear like fridge magnets on Patrick Caulfield’s canvases. But Morandi was not an ironist. Astonishingly, up to and beyond the middle of the 20th century, he painted pictures which play the game of representation as though it had just been invented. No stale tricks. On a map where every ...”

“... of Hemingway’s birth. The published book is a homunculus of the original, created by his son Patrick out of a manuscript twice as long. Billed as ‘A Fictional Memoir’, it falls roughly into two parts, her-and-his acts of initiation. First, Mary Hemingway learns lion-killing, pursuing a 400-lb beast for three months. After she leaves camp for ...”

“... His choice was inspired: he decided to send Mr Justice Devlin to the Old Bailey for that session. Patrick Devlin had been an outstanding practitioner at the commercial Bar, his manner about as remote as it could be from the fashionable knock-about jury practice of Melford Stevenson, or the political world of Manningham-Buller. Devlin had been appointed to the ...”

“... turn down Yeats’s volume, evade his peremptory rhetoric. Seamus Heaney has disclosed that it was Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry that showed him what might still be done: though I think it must also have indicated the limits of that achievement. Flann O’Brien had to rid his mind of Joyce before he could do his proper work: the riddance is At ...”

“... Simone de Beauvoir had to change her original title for When things of the spirit come first, because it had been unexpectedly pre-empted by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The new title which she picked (Quand prime le spirituel) was a simple variant of the other (Primauté du Spirituel), and the difference has in any case become insignificant in the English translation ...”

“... he sees pilgrims performing ritual progresses on bare knees round and round the cairns on Croagh-Patrick, with priests urging on the blood-dripping laggards. Yet he believes it is the threat of the weekly Confessional that keeps pretty Irish girls so ‘highly moral’. An indefatigable and cheerful reporter, he visits gaols, asylums and poorhouses and finds ...”

“... for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more likely to think of themselves as ...”

“... than she gave. She spent a week in a nursing-home because she’d been drinking too much; and told Patrick Leigh Fermor that Diana Cooper had rung her there ‘and said, “Hear you’re in a home for inebriates”: she then came along, seduced all and sundry and left after booking a bed to die in; my prestige much improved by the visitation.’ When in 1981 ...”