“... he still manages to lift five, six times while he’s choking on his own hot blood. That’s Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of this brilliant, revolting, original and entirely debased piece of literary kitsch. Bateman presents himself as a decent guy who just happens (‘I find myself’) to be a serial killer as well – much as Ellis had come to be ...”

“... unsafe design. Moving to Washington in 1963, he took a job as a part-time consultant for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the assistant secretary of labour, who assigned him to prepare a report on car safety. The result was Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), a compound of eye-glazing charts, moral vitriol and wrenching anecdotal detail. Nader soon testified before Abraham ...”

“... apologetics after the German occupation in 1940; the Bauhaus-affiliated die neue linie was, Patrick Rössler writes, ‘a figurehead … and fig leaf’ for the modernist movement under the Third Reich, allowing the Nazis to make a token display of open-mindedness and cultural tolerance. In the US and Britain political commitments were more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of failing to properly investigate allegations against the party’s chief whip at Westminster, Patrick Grady. The irony is that actions designed to make it easier and safer to report sexual harassment have served to shore up existing barriers; a policy designed to help women take on powerful men has demonstrated only the potential costs of doing so.On 18 ...”

“... Anabaptists, who were also puritans, found the entire ritual of baptism obnoxious. The historian Patrick Collinson’s definition of puritans as ‘the hotter sort of Protestants’ was deliberately vague: they are too diverse to be easily grouped together. Eventually the Anabaptists split, into Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish.The heat was generated by ...”

“... things brought about the marketisation of the English house as a design brand, selling a concept Patrick Wright described as the world of Brideshead, ‘a countervailing and predominantly rural world based on private values and culturally sanctioned hierarchy, where history is venerated as tradition and culture is based on ancestry and descent’. The ...”

“... coral reef islands off Pohnpei have shrunk or disappeared totally in the past decade according to Patrick D. Nunn, a professor of geography and sustainability at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. Two more are likely to go over the next few years.Among the recipients of Panuelo’s letter were the four Pacific nations that recognise ...”

“... interest rates have to go up and it’s a good thing,’ Truss’s maverick economic guru, Patrick Minford, told the Times in July. ‘A normal level is more like 5-7 per cent.’ House prices are now set to fall at least 10 per cent over the next year, while anyone who took out a two-year fixed-rate mortgage in summer 2021 may find that their interest ...”

“... Yard, who has written an introduction to Penwarden’s book, does not think so. However, a certain Patrick Thomas, aged 24, was in March 1990 brought to trial, accused of having murdered a nine-year-old child in February 1984. The President of the Court, at Valence, defined some of the questions that came under discussion as being ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In the case of Smethwick, he had been robbed of the Parliamentary presence of the tenth-rate Patrick Gordon Walker, who he wished to make Foreign Secretary in preference to the even more hideous George Brown, and was thus subjected to the vast annoyance of a by-election which he went on to mishandle badly. In the case of the brutish conduct of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”