“... anniversary* by dealing in its current number with theoretical issues: but to no decisive end. Patrick Parrinder refers, in an aside, to ‘the mad rush to theorise literary studies in the past few years’, and to ‘the reductiveness of much current theory, its overweening ambitiousness and vanity, the incommensurability of different theories’. Colin ...”

“... students and a street dancer, an eye for detail and jealousy informing familiar situations. Patrick Gale returns to English farce in ‘Borneo’ to punish and amuse. Bee’s bandage-party for the Afghans breaks up after one of the guests ...”

“... Club for not wearing a tie, and how he then had lunch in the canteen at the back with Sir Patrick Nairne, who becomes ‘Pat’ thereafter. Clearly, Donnison was successful in getting many of the reforms he wanted: for example, the relative value of benefits was published in the SBC Notes and News, and in the annual Supplementary Benefits review, in ...”

“... great actresses and six only. These are Bernhardt, Réjane, Mrs Kendal, Ellen Terry, Duse and Mrs Patrick Campbell.’ The times have changed. If there are any great actresses in 1986, nobody is writing plays for them. Agate met a Frenchwoman in 1917, married and speedily divorced her. He wanted London guardsmen. Arnold Bennett noted in his diary: J.E. Agate ...”

“... of ordering 1500 lashes for five men before breakfast. A still more energetic flogger was Captain Patrick Logan, reckoned the most brutal camp commandant of all. Lachlan Macquarie, on the other hand, in spite of twenty years in the Army, was ‘a fine early example of that breed of Scottish administrators who kept the engine-room of Empire ...”

“... death and disease were unruly playmates. ‘Resentful’ is the grown-up word, and it is the one Patrick Boyde uses in his excellent essay on this elegy, a piece of genuinely illuminating (and personal) criticism that holds this whole book together; but it suggests slightly too much reflection. These children are not refusing resentment, nor are they ...”

“... in 1798. In the evening we drive out to a moss – a bog – near Slemish, the mountain where St Patrick is said to have tended sheep, and where Henry Joy McCracken, one of the United leaders, hid out after the Battle of Antrim. So much of our conversation seems to be about wars, places, pieties, the past, that it’s a relief to listen to this old man ...”

“... Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, Lillian Hellman, Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Hardwick in America; Patrick White in Australia. Books previously declined were now published. There were reprints. There was an interest, and it would grow. It was all good, but it had come too late. In 1968 Bill Blake died and Stead was consumed with grief and remorse. At that ...”

“... and hearses and grave openings at Moyarta where all our people were back to our common man, Patrick Lynch. She turned over the bankbook with my name on it, added, she said, after her brother had died all those years ago. ‘Be sure there’s plenty of sandwiches and porter and wine, sherry wine, something sweet.’ ‘And whiskey for the ones that dig ...”

“... Konwicki give a fascinating picture of Poland – no, they are Poland, as Juan Rulfo is Mexico, or Patrick White Australia. Further, they contain some of the funniest, most outrageous, acid and lugubrious writing I have ever read. I don’t think I have ever been spoken to by an author the way I have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The Polish ...”

“... terrorists who can evade conviction by threatening to kill all hostile witnesses. Mr Patrick Cooney, a former Fine Gael Minister of Justice, has recommended detention, both in the North and in the South, with the successful experience of 1956-62 in mind. But that would mean an infringement of civil rights. It is a cruel dilemma, and one which ...”

“... north Norfolk coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on horseback. They should have known the real story, because it was there from the start. Staring ...”

“... his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife of Patrick Leigh Fermor, famous at that time for his activities during the war, including the controversial kidnapping of the German commander on Crete. The third was Barbara Hutchinson, whose mother, Mary, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, had been a Bloomsbury hostess ...”

“... Seamus Heaney so skilfully used in both his poems and his prose, he relates (in an essay on Patrick Kavanagh from 1985) that one of his aunts ‘planted a chestnut in a jam jar’ in the year of his birth. In due course the seedling was planted out and grew to a fine height. Heaney says that ‘over the years I came to identify my own life with the life ...”

“... suited it in Armani, gave it a facial peel and took it out for a prowl, installed its protagonist, Patrick Bateman, as an archetype of the metrosexual serial killer and elevated its author to public enemy number one in much of the literary world. The fury in the novel and the fury towards Ellis formed a feedback loop that has tramp-stamped his subsequent ...”