“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Congress and the American people. Wills nevertheless makes a strong case, elaborating on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s argument in Secrecy: The American Experience (1998), that the short-term political advantages of concealing crimes and embarrassments and of blindsiding congressional opponents are outweighed by the long-term costs. ‘Policy,’ as he ...”

“... us how they set about their task. In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had ...”

“... his personality has a direct bearing on his success.’ The most substantial biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell ...”

“... à trois. Simenon was mapping out futures, more or less tormented, for the three of them. As Patrick Marnham remarks in his excellent 1994 biography, ‘the account of the experience became part of the experience.’ Neither woman headed for the door. Simenon by this time was a multimillionaire. How does Inspector Maigret fit into all this? For if ...”

“... within the discipline of sociology on the subject of black culture in the wake of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and Oscar Lewis’s ‘culture of poverty’ theories, the vast majority of blacks, and especially black youth and those working on the front lines of poverty mitigation, have been ...”

“... civil war, but society was lively. Among his compatriots were Osbert Lancaster, Rex Warner and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Maurice Cardiff, the army officer who ran the council temporarily before Runciman arrived, recalls him vividly dealing with his improbable staff as they all gamely muddled through. ‘He had two kinds of yesses, one short, even clipped, was ...”