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“... out forty years ago: that there was much more to Malthus than Malthusianism. Some years ago Patricia James did much to give humanity to the image of Malthus by publishing his travel diaries. He came alive, particularly on his Norwegian journey of 1799, being overcharged for horse hire, tactfully refusing to eat dirty Lapp food, inquiring always ...”

“... cidevant, and this is bound to affect some of his arguments. A good example is his use of St James, whom he identifies as the brother of Jesus, to distinguish him from the disciples who were also called James. His theory is that the mysterious man who joined the band as they walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus on the day ...”

“... The epigraphs of P.D. James (now that she has taken to using them) are important. ‘There’s this to say for blood and breath,’ runs the latest one, from A.E. Housman: ‘They give a man a taste for death.’ Are we being directed to hold in mind those other lines of Housman’s? Oh like enough ’tis blood, my dear, For when the knife has slit The throat across from ear to ear ’Twill bleed because of it ...”

“... Dares to be intellectual,’ breathed the Guardian’s review of Patricia Duncker’s first novel, Hallucinating Foucault. But co-opting the defenceless Michel Foucault into a romanticised fantasy about the Reader does not guarantee a novel’s intellectuality. The story of the timid Cambridge student who falls in love with the subject of his thesis – French writer Paul Michel, a malign blend of Dany Cohn-Bendit and Guy Hocquenghem – and carries him off from an asylum, struck me above all as daring to be improbable ...”

“... was an odd pig and I do not think that his like will be there again’) comes the irreverent James Stephens – irreverent, as Foster says, towards revival high-mindedness and po-faced antiquarianism. Stephens’s work is characterised by an inspired frivolity, and even when it comes chock-full of gods and fairies, the author’s bent for social ...”

“... present themselves and their work. For instance, Sen describes the classic paddle-wheel experiment James Joule carried out in a brewery. But he doesn’t mention what the historian Otto Sibum found when he attempted to replicate it: Joule had omitted several essential details from his instructions, notably the presence of co-experimenters – the countless ...”

“... and family, he married his first cousin once removed, and then quickly fathered three children. Patricia James, the author of the still definitive biography Population Malthus (1979), speculates that Malthus’s domestic situation stamped itself on his demographic imagination – though many similarly placed younger sons among professional men at the ...”

“... of the other side of Dutch art – its preoccupation with death, obsession, loss of proportion. Patricia Dolan, the narrator of Weber’s ‘literary thriller’, is a middle-aged Irish-American art historian. Her Irish cousin Mickey is a Republican activist. They fall in love. She helps him to steal, and demand a ransom for, a Vermeer belonging to the ...”

“... only one incident where his literary judgment was overcome by his moral enthusiasm: the case of James Kirkup’s poem about Jesus which he publicly defended against the charge of blasphemy. The poem may or may not be blasphemous – I myself would say it is not – but it is such an indefensibly bad poem qua poem that it must have gone against his grain to ...”

“... had a look around Metato and reported that he found nothing much. But he commended a piece by Patricia Hutchins, written for the Southern Review in the 1960s. She liked to put writers in their place – Ezra Pound’s Kensington and James Joyce’s Dublin – and in Metato quickly found a priest who gave her a vivid ...”

“... out that Dorothy Richardson’s experiments with prose style had something in common with those of James Joyce; you don’t, however, catch anyone applauding Joyce for having written out of the abyss of masculine consciousness, though it might have been said of him with equal pertinence. Most of the studies under review here are concerned to see justice done ...”

“... Their behaviour at the dinner table is unengaging. This literary girl, very strangely, blames James Joyce among the others for giving her a false perspective on the Irish. Has she actually read him? Or did she seriously believe the country had stuck in 1904? A lot of issues are raised in this novel, and then allowed to drift away: for instance, when it ...”

“... of an intelligent and informal analysis of the concept, chiefly in its relation to literature, Patricia Spacks remarks on the absence of adolescent pregnancy in China, and connects it with the compulsory retirement, under the Communist regime, of men at 55 and women at 50. There is thus a vast reserve of voluntary spies whose socially acceptable – indeed ...”

“... a better novelist than herself, and expressed a fear that she might ‘turn into a writer like James Joyce’; there was little danger. In the flurry of chatter and prophecy that preceded the publication of Daphne du Maurier the main emphasis was on the novelist’s homosexuality. Chatto’s handout spoke delicately of ‘her highly significant friendship ...”

“... early as 1744, Caroline Lennox had eloped with Henry Fox, later Lord Holland and father of Charles James. It was a sensible move as he was far more exciting than his three future brothers-in-law, one of whom – Mr Conolly as a matter of fact – was so boring that the other two noticed it. There was little scandal; Fox was not a highly unsuitable match, and ...”