“... events. In this sense, his new novel’s title carries the same air of knowing overstatement as Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’. It may be that Tóibín’s most significant gift is a very basic and mysterious one: he creates fictional worlds in which readers find it easy to believe. The Spanish mountain village in The South, the Wexford coastal town in The ...”

“... would I mind, me name is Paddy.”’ Jim delivers this line in an oirish accent. ‘His name was Patrick,’ he explains, ‘and do you know what?’ Silence. ‘I had to fill out a form saying that I didn’t mind being called Tubby. True. It’s political correctness gone fucking mad.’ The team musters a laugh. Someone tries to move things on with a joke ...”

“... sonnetish trick of describing a small occasion in a way that suggests an obscured larger history. Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’ turns a boundary dispute between Irish farmers into a Homeric encounter. Geoffrey Hill, the modern master of the sonnet as vehicle for embedded history, reflects on the idea of England in one of the sonnets from ‘An Apology for ...”

“... forward by global capitalism. Only in a very few places, largely those built on virgin soil, like Patrick Geddes’s Tel Aviv, could urban planning be counted a success; where existing cities had to be rebuilt, the planners were pushed aside by more powerful forces. Defying all the best intentions of the planners, the motor car proved unmanageable within ...”

“... last it was a very good show. No trace here of the Rosamund Tea Rooms in The Slaves of Solitude, Patrick Hamilton’s pitiless study of wartime Britain set in a provincial boarding house; no notion either that the 1945 election was anything but a unanimous call to extend the spirit of wartime solidarity, even though a fair number of the country’s ruling ...”

“... any other standard of right and wrong that made him more than a match for opponents like Senator Patrick Leahy, the head of the judiciary committee in 2007-8, or Jay Rockefeller, the head of the intelligence committee in those years. Leahy and Rockefeller had their chance to subject him to investigation when the Democrats became the majority party in ...”

“... in Seattle in 1999. In 2000, protesters injured 23 police officers at the funeral in Brooklyn of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed Haitian-American killed by an undercover cop. Were these anticipations of the current moment? Is it different this time around? Leftists once took comfort in the idea that every generation of radicals is doomed to fail, except the ...”

“... of me, even as I might have been.’ My favourite in this neo-Gothic genre is ‘The Smell’ by Patrick McGrath, whose first-person hero is haunted by a stench that is intimate but unlocatable (a Lacanian would call it ‘extimate’). The last lines read: ‘For I was indeed the source, I the smell, I the thing that dripped and stank … like a dirty cork ...”

“... of a sliced head of red cabbage and here evocative of churning surf. This stone is identified by Patrick Rogers in his guide to the cathedral’s stones as ‘Fantastico Viola’, a recent trade name for a variety of richly veined marble from the quarries of Carrara and Seravezza.It may be that when marbles were thought to be liquid in origin – when ‘few ...”

“... most notorious assassination – the ‘political murder’ of Wrong’s subtitle – was that of Patrick Karegeya, Kagame’s former childhood friend, comrade-in-arms and security chief. In 2006 Kagame had him jailed for ‘insubordination’ – his second stint in prison. On his release he fled to South Africa and formed an opposition party in exile. At ...”

“... a knack for arousing hostility’, according to her biographer Hazel Rowley. Rowley describes Patrick White inviting Stead to lunch. White had championed her in her old age, loudly praised her work and supported her with cash transfers masked as prizes. Stead, at this point a heavy drinker, ‘arrived in a taxi, with a bag of empty bottles which she asked ...”

“... Mystery surrounds the fate of Norm’s first wife, the mother of Penny’s older half-brothers – Patrick, a gentle semi-dropout, and Matt, an angry waste-disposal entrepreneur who’s projected, from the get-go, as a sexually threatening figure. He’s first seen, in a flashback, forcefully bundling the adolescent Penny into her bed, brushing her thigh with ...”

“... he’d slept with the wife of one of his professors. He was also an acolyte of the sociologist Patrick Geddes, who had just published The Evolution of Sex, which served as an ‘ethical endorsement of desire’ and defended the use of contraception. Daniell, whom Rowbotham variously describes as brilliant, imperious and quivering with ‘excessive ...”

“... of those angels – both as a cognisant individual and a celestial radio. Rilke goes on to ask, in Patrick Bridgwater’s translation:Oh, to whom can we thenturn in our need? Not to angels or men,and the knowing animals knowwe are not very securely at homein our interpreted world.Weinberger has made an infidel’s Book of Hours in an attempt to reinterpret a ...”

“... describe the feelings of English people in America a century earlier.The point is surely that, as Patrick Collinson argued in a famous essay about the Elizabethan ‘monarchical republic’ (absent from Suranyi’s bibliography), it was possible to have expectations of one’s superiors, defend oneself by law and custom, and feel like a citizen – as in a ...”