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“... the hangman or by grave-robbing. Before his death another, almost contemporary, ‘Irish Giant’, Patrick Cotter, knowing that the anatomists would be itching to get hold of his corpse, prescribed measures to prevent the theft of his body from the Roman Catholic chapel in Bristol where he was to be buried. There were to be three coffins, the outer two made of ...”

“... That Patrick O’Brian would write a good book about the early life of Joseph Banks was to be expected. Banks combined the enthusiasm and practical competence of one of O’Brian’s fictional heroes, Jack Aubrey, with the passion for natural history of another, Stephen Maturin. Moreover O’Brian’s accounts in his novels of 18th-century seamanship are, like Tolstoy’s battle pieces, better historical description than most historians manage: it was clear that the variety of incident in Banks’s voyage to the Great South Sea with Cook, which matches that of any fictional adventure, was a subject made for him ...”

“... to embody these feelings is an elderly, one-eyed woman, a singer of ballads, who resembles, in Patrick Creagh’s translation, an early version of Yeats’s Crazy Jane: Woman whose face is worn and green As pebbles in a mountain stream, Tears of love have cracked your skin! This woman rarely appears in Les Amours jaunes. She stands somewhere at the very ...”

“... the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence.* There’s a world of difference between the phrase ‘you’re altogether ...”

“... who would create the new dance born from the new music’. She thought that her young son Patrick might be that ‘one’. Photography, too, was suspect, and in many photos she wears an expression of placid forbearance: the smile of Mona Lisa under eyes that are appraising. Her portrait and the sensation of her dancing would be rendered by countless ...”

“... for this volume by the publishers certainly exists. The book’s concern and aims are stated by Patrick Wormald in the foreword: ‘The mutual interaction of intellectual ideas and social realities is arguably history’s most abiding theme. If this book takes that theme any further, it will be a proper tribute to a historian who never allowed pupils or ...”

“... until everyone felt the presence of the devil on the doorstep each day, just waiting his chance. Patrick Wright evokes Cold War stereotypes very concretely, beginning in Fulton, Missouri, where in 1946 Churchill first claimed to discern the curtain that had ‘descended from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’. His speech aimed at creating a ...”

“... when this volume begins, Betjeman was feeling the anxiety of the ageing writer, well expressed by Patrick Kavanagh, a friend of his from wartime Dublin: Give us another poem, he said Or they will think your muse is dead; Another middle-aged departure Of Apollo from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with ...”

“... the outposts of empire, more like the British in India than like the magnates who entertained Patrick Leigh-Fermor when he passed through the Balkans. There was Italian blood on the father’s side and Romanian-Greek and Irish on the mother’s. Rezzori is very much concerned with blood and racial inheritance in all his books. The concern itself appears ...”

“... Does life really spell itself out as starkly as this? The answer, of course, is no. But then Patrick McGrath is not a naturalistic writer. His first book, Blood and Water, was a collection of brilliant gothic pastiches and since then he has edited an anthology. The New Gothic, Dr Haggard’s Disease, like his other novels, contains some of the principal ...”

“... An old biological joke (at least I think it is old) has it that the patron saint of ecology is St Patrick. If new species can arise from a predecessor without the need for a geographical barrier (sympatrically, to use the technical term and to explain the joke, feeble as it is), then it is much easier to understand why there can be hundreds of related species ...”

“... its depravity. It’s a pop chronicle of evil: the protagonist, a vile Wall Street broker named Patrick Bateman who inexplicably turns serial killer, is, it turns out, just your everyday fashion victim – Ellis’s version of the Nazi. Like the murderer nervously wiping away his fingerprints, Ellis engages in the meticulous erasure of any evidence of ...”

“... her lack of interest in playing any important part in Irish affairs in the future. In this work, Patrick Buckland, previously known for his books on Irish Unionism, shows how weary the Titan had become of the whole Irish burden by 1921. There was not even a substantial right-wing movement (as distinct from the odd diehard) bent upon saving Ulster from the ...”

“... necessary to do any of the thousand special things that have been done there. John Major and Sir Patrick Mayhew do not like it, but one of the defining characteristics of Irish Nationalism – and Unionism, for that matter – is that it has always had a tradition of physical force. The survival of that tradition is lamentable and anachronistic, but they are ...”

“... Patrick McGinley’s pastoral parable, The Red Men, begins with Gulban Heron, rural overlord of a hotel, a shop and four sons. There is dark-haired Jack, capable, ruthless, dissolute, his father’s favourite, and there are three carrot-polled losers, the red men of the title: Cookie, a jaded man of letters, typically apt to give life a literary form and content; cynical Joey, with his fire-scarred face, who mistrusts the emotions and gives his mind to geology and shopkeeping; and Father Bosco, with his fire-damped soul, reminiscently plagued by lust and distressed by the loneliness of his calling ...”