“... It attracted an eclectic range of contributors: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Hubert Butler, Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty and others. ‘Cannot we all meet, throwing in what we have?’ Bowen wrote in her essay ‘The Big House’, published in the Bell’s first issue. The magazine accordingly stood for pluralism ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric,’ Graves writes at the start of The White Goddess (1948), his synoptic account of the history of Western myth ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a tradition – progressive and uncensorious – that construes sex as a natural phenomenon. Sir Patrick Geddes and J.A. Thomason’s popular volume, The Evolution of Sex, and Havelock Ellis’s massive Studies in the Psychology of Sex, as well as a host of more technical studies and the amateur anthropology of the Men and Women’s Club all brought sex ...”

“... which I worked, were the happily idiosyncratic Communists Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edgell Rickword, Patrick Hamilton, Montagu Slater, Randall Swingler and, around them, particularly in nearby pubs, such friends as Nancy Cunard, Lennox Berkeley, Roy Fuller, John Minton, Dylan Thomas, Julian Trevelyan and so on. Our Time and Theatre ‘Today, like Horizon, Poetry ...”

“... experience. The dérive is in fact defined by the drunkenness of the subject (in a recent essay, Patrick ffrench described it as ‘an analytic pub crawl’) and his or her relation to an environment which has lost shape, meaning or form. It is a negation of the city as a place which invites the subject to remain detached from the object of its gaze. In this ...”

“... In June 1934, a young Romanian Jew published a book about being a Jew in Romania. Mihail Sebastian’s De Doua mii de ani (‘For 2000 Years’) was not an autobiography or a novel or a diary, although a bit of each. The hero, who is never named, lives the tragicomedy of assimilation in a land and a culture that both invite and repel. A rich country full of ragged people, Romania uneasily combined a 19th-century rural and suburban servitude with the sophistication of 20th-century Paris fashions and very mod mod cons ...”

“... at infrastructure, and enlightened developments (mostly in the suburbs), but almost no one before Patrick Geddes tackled the structure of cities – how the invisible hand of commerce might be reconciled with the all too visible streets and buildings, so prone to change, wear and tear. In urban matters, most of the ideas-merchants evoked and quoted by Hunt ...”

“... of the many writers who were drawn to use the story in one way or another, among them Trollope, Patrick White, Robin Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Two days after becoming taoiseach in 1979, for example, Haughey approached the property developer Patrick Gallagher to ask for help in clearing his huge debt with Allied Irish Bank. Gallagher gave him £300,000 out of what he later testified was ‘a sense of duty’. Fianna Fáil politicians were not the only ones involved. In his testimony to the Mahon ...”