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“... that lessons be taken from some ravings in Isaiah and the Book of Revelations. My brother Patrick read the parable of the sower instead. Its lesson of prudent husbandry was spelled out in Watsonville. Was it fate or carpentry that had stricken some houses and spared others? Watsonville is a Third World town, like West Oakland low on the news agenda as ...”

“... of Burns. In this respect and others, Burns is like a peasant poet of modern times, the Irishman Patrick Kavanagh, who spent many hard and lonely years as a farmer, and of whom Seamus Heaney, another Irish poet with close ties to the world of the countryside, has written: ‘he wrested his idiom bare-handed out of a literary nowhere.’ ‘I am ...”

“... was sometimes said, was always in the pub but never really of it. Much the same could be said of Patrick Hamilton, who was best known in his lifetime for his stage chillers Rope (1929) and Gaslight (1938), but is mostly remembered for the expert depictions of joyless interwar boozing in Hangover Square (1941) and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the ...”

“... documents. Reporters found none of the drama that had been touted in the days after the raid. Patrick Cockburn wrote about the contrast between the administration’s initial claims that bin Laden was the ‘spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web’ and what the translations actually showed: that bin Laden was ‘delusional’ and had ...”

“... Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars ...”

“... discovered Flann O’Brien in the late 1970s, background information could not easily be found. In Patrick Power’s excellent translation I read The Poor Mouth (An Béal Bocht) with enjoyment but without suspecting that it was intended as a parody of a whole sub-genre of Gaelic misery memoirs. I read The Best of Myles through a fog of cheerful ignorance about ...”

“... includes a hypocritical left-wing English journalist (modelled, it would appear, on Alexander Cockburn) who prospers by turning out fawning articles for magazines like House and Garden. It also shows the English country-house interior turning up on Wall Street’s 50th floor: imported, cut down to size and squeezed into place by an enthusiastic banker. In ...”

“... history until the McLibel trial. The presiding judge at the criminal trial, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, said, in sentencing the Claimant to 14 years in jail for perjury (because of the lies he had told in the civil suit to gain possession of the Tichborne estate): ‘Never was there a trial in England, I believe, since that memorable trial of Charles ...”

“... untouched by blarney. In the 1960s the BBC series One Pair of Eyes devoted a programme to Claud Cockburn. There is a sequence in which Claud and Jim stroll down the street, and Claud remarks: ‘Jim, do you remember that time we were having a drink with Hemingway in a bar in Madrid and a Fascist bomb came through the ceiling?’ Quick on the uptake, my ...”

“... juries, we will do better to go directly to the scholars whose work he has borrowed from – Cockburn, Langbein, Douglas Hay, and especially J.M. Beattie’s Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800. Never mind. Verdict according to Conscience gathers a great deal together in one place, has many shrewd pages and much patient exposition. It will be a ...”