“... of such portentousness. Indeed, some of its chapters could even profit from a dash of it, as (like Patrick Parrinder on science fiction) they mostly give us plot summaries along with the odd low-key critical comment. Wendy Lesser ends her hymn to Penelope Fitzgerald by teetering on the brink of throwing a Gwyneth Paltrow: ‘when I spoke about her in Los ...”

“... a crime so curiously violent that nothing could adequately explain it. So, in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman kills a girlfriend, apparently because she thought that his suit was designed by Henry Stuart rather than Giorgio Armani. This reduces murder to the merely satirical. A motive and an action are set up against each other in a way that says, without ...”

“... timelessness, relished but without striving for effect. We are in the world of Briggflatts, of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ or Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. Let me quote two descriptions from the novel, one of an interior, the other of a meal taken outdoors. In the first, Bjartur’s son has been tapping on the roof and squeaking, to get ...”

“... bear an odd resemblance to popular naval romances of our own time, like those of C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian; for poetry in the 17th century was expected to cater for all a public’s literary appetites, and usually did so very well, whether it was war in Heaven or bombardment on the high seas. Sylvester’s version of the French poet Du Bartas is much ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to lend themselves to this ‘human interest’ approach than they used to be. Three years ago, Patrick O’Brien, then director of the Institute of Historical Research, disparaged the whole genre of political biography. He argued that ‘just as there are scholars of the performing arts who prefer to contemplate actors rather than acting, players rather ...”

“... lack of personal documents, has talked at greater length to friends. One of them, David’s doctor Patrick Woodcock, points out that ‘in her way she knew herself to be a great comic figure.’ It would have helped if David’s biographers had shared that perception. After the failure of her last important love affair, David suffered a cerebral haemorrhage ...”

“... bares his teeth, giving her a hideous animal look, much the same look that Rose’s ex-husband, Patrick, in ‘The Beggar Maid’, gives her on seeing her at the airport, long after their divorce: ‘He made a face at her. It was a truly hateful, savage, warning face; infantile, self-indulgent, yet calculated; it was a timed explosion of disgust and ...”

“... family lived in Budapest and summered on the family estates in the southern Carpathians – which Patrick Leigh Fermor has called ‘the most resented frontier in Europe’. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the onset of political and racial turmoil, the Goldfinger family moved to Vienna. In 1920, Ernö went to Paris, by then as a Polish ...”

“... a post which brought more prestige than income. Like Tennyson’s despondent father, or the fiery Patrick Brontë, Gabriele Rossetti was a displaced figure. His thwarted ambitions shadowed and deepened the lives of his children. All four took it for granted that they would not be ordinary. It was the children’s responsibility to justify their father’s ...”

“... and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate spirit and, as Patrick O’Brian wrote in the LRB, ‘that fine zeal and conviction which arises from original research’. It might have been called definitive, but, as this superb new edition reminds us, history never sleeps, and nor does the sea. Evidence from the shifting ...”