“... in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the biographers’ Marlowe is always liable to be defined by his death, if only because a sizeable proportion of the detailed evidence we have about him ...”

“... mobility having stalled – a phenomenon which none of the books mentions. In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent relationship ...”

“... the Trump administration. But we would do better to pay more attention to his interim replacement, Patrick Shanahan, and the agenda he is pursuing. Shanahan, who spent thirty years at Boeing, is described by one insider as ‘a living, breathing product of the military-industrial complex’. Under Mattis he was the organisational muscle in a Defence Department ...”

“... black novel, no Jewish novel and certainly no gay novel, although a black Caribbean writer such as Patrick Chamoiseau can win the Goncourt and many French writers have been Jewish or homosexual or both. In Britain the situation seems to be located somewhere between the extremes represented by the US and France. High culture in general and gay culture in ...”

“... up to Kercher’s murder; her brutal interrogation; her confession, in which she implicated Patrick Lumumba, the Black owner of the bar where she worked; the two years she spent in prison before trial; her conviction, appeal and eventual acquittal. Before the book’s publication, the press questioned the value of Knox writing about her own ...”

“... doctor put a wound dressing on me. I was never searched. I don’t know why they shot me.’2. Patrick Campbell, 53, docker: ‘I was running away from the Saracens when I was hit in the back. I never saw who hit me – I suppose it was the soldiers because they were running after me. No one else was firing.’3. Alex Nash, 52, unemployed painter: ‘I saw ...”

“... requires them to be members of either House: in recent decades at least two individuals – Patrick Gordon Walker and Frank Cousins – held ministerial office when they were neither MP nor peer. In spite of these elementary constitutional facts, much of the press has seemed to suggest that executive government is the apex of the democratic structure ...”

“... is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his biographer, describes the sinister shabbiness of this occasion, the nervous fascination of the audience laughing at a renegade Spanish priest reciting unfamiliar Latin words, the canny showmanship, the plastic buckets brimming with ...”

“... at the hands of Putin. As in the 1850s, the change of clothes has gone both ways. Here is Patrick Buchanan, a speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan, wondering at the double standard of the anti-Russian Democrats: ‘Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did. Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the US bomb Serbia for 78 days to ...”

“... a pronounced theological emphasis, there is no mention here of Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Bataille, Patrick White, Beckett, Nabokov, Bellow, Spark, Marilynne Robinson, Saramago or Coetzee (whose novel Diary of a Bad Year has several paragraphs on the afterlife). Nabokov’s work is shot through with a persistent mysticism; in Pnin, the author imagines the dead ...”

“... inclined. Aiming high, he applied to work with Ernest Rutherford. Rejected, he turned to Patrick Blackett, a glamorous experimenter whom contemporaries described as ‘a young Oedipus’. Oppenheimer was miserable, near collapse, bedevilled by sexual frustration and academic anxieties. He lacked the practical skills needed for experimental ...”

“... in use.’ When the Cabinet was feuding over Westland, the Sun naturally backed her, and so when Patrick Mayhew, the Solicitor-General, told Michael Heseltine that his account of the rival bids might contain ‘material inaccuracies’, this confidential legal advice was immediately leaked to the Sun, whose sensitive and nuanced front-page account of the ...”

“... such as David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes, though it certainly happens in life. Patrick Gale’s recent television drama Man in an Orange Shirt, part of a season marking the anniversary of decriminalisation, was based on his family history, right down to the novelettish-seeming details of his mother discovering her husband’s love letters ...”

“... stay in the role until 1999, developing plays by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, John Guare, John Patrick Shanley, Wendy Wasserstein and many others.When they joined forces, Richards was 63 and Wilson was 37. Every live wire goes dead without connections, and Richards had them. So Wilson could quit his job as a short-order cook and devote himself to ...”

“... nor does it parade a ready-made metaphysic of gloom, like the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick White. It is not apocalyptic but dreadfully and intently domestic, like Dickens’s world of Todgers. It is divided into three parts: ‘A Head without a World’, ‘Headless World’ and ‘The World in the Head’. Kien, the hero, a recluse and a ...”