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“... from it. When Simon returns to the hospital some time after his discharge, an X-ray shows ‘a white smudge on the picture, behind the kneecap’. This is worse still, but it perversely seems to help Simon with his priorities: ‘The mystique around cancer makes it hard to set aside, even when it is not the most important thing.’ New importances are ...”

“... in Australia recall themes from the poets, novelists and painters of earlier decades, including Patrick White (Riders in the Chariot) and Sidney Nolan (the Ned Kelly series). The title-poem conjures with the idea of a bird species that may or may not exist – ‘If at all, then fringe dwellers/of the centre’, like poetry, an epiphenomenon of life in ...”

“... Morning One house next next again pert green lawn white garage sprinkler muted nothing out of order no thing untoward wraparound sound, sigh of fridge door city tightening the mountains seem not to move have texture pavement empty, road adrift, the car shining safely the neighbour hood coming to a slow coming to a rolling boil No The police stations seamless, riveted and sealed, foreign as spacecrafts; still the place grows around them ...”

“... a knack for arousing hostility’, according to her biographer Hazel Rowley. Rowley describes Patrick White inviting Stead to lunch. White had championed her in her old age, loudly praised her work and supported her with cash transfers masked as prizes. Stead, at this point a heavy drinker, ‘arrived in a ...”

“... Konwicki give a fascinating picture of Poland – no, they are Poland, as Juan Rulfo is Mexico, or Patrick White Australia. Further, they contain some of the funniest, most outrageous, acid and lugubrious writing I have ever read. I don’t think I have ever been spoken to by an author the way I have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The ...”

“... and artists warmed to him, as did taxi-drivers, policemen and women. He once said to me: ‘Patrick, you’ve got a high gloss.’ I was flattered, like some polished banister. His own story begins with particularly vivid descriptions of boyhood in Clarecastle. The sex is hilarious and the recipes are inspiring and clear. On preparing mussels: ‘If ...”

“... and topographical sweep make the poem seem almost like a fragmented and extremely compacted Patrick White novel; and it is not always easy to follow. It is technically inventive, a quasi-cinematic exercise in sudden cross-cutting and the talented mimicry of a wide range of Australian voices and accents: but I find the rise and swell of Murray’s ...”

“... So did Australia’s most celebrated historian, Manning Clark, and its most celebrated writer, Patrick White. A new bitterness, of the kind that divided Britain over Suez and the United States over Vietnam, now split Australia. That Whitlam had greatly contributed to his own destruction by his indifference to economic reality – the oil price rise ...”

“... Something New under the Sun, begins as a classic writer-goes-to-Hollywood story. The writer is Patrick Hamlin, a forty-something with two novels and an ‘epic novella’ to his name. He’s not as successful as he thinks he should be (but his books sound turgid and dreary). His wife, Alison, has become so preoccupied with the climate crisis that she has ...”

“... the image of loss comes hard on a reference to Synge’s Riders to the Sea:in Maurya’s speech‘White boards’ are like storm-gleams on the floodAt the very end, or the salt salvaged markingsOf a raft for books, a bier to be borne.I imagine us bracing ourselves for the first lift,Then staggering for balance, it has grown so light.This collection is full of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Watson at Gonville and Caius. (Mr Prynne, I’m told, doesn’t have much use for fiction: Patrick White excepted.) Poetry was struck off in the Eighties. Now it’s a special-interest item, available on prescription – like Southern Gothic vampirism, Uzi and crack Brixton scorchers, cyberpunk. Like the rest of genre fiction it is dealt with in ...”

“... to have been built on a fairy-mound. Undaunted, they moved in, along with Bridget’s father, Patrick Boland, a landless labourer who must have taken pride in the improvement to his family’s fortunes. All that was lacking was a child to bless the happy union. The weather in March was bitter and Bridget fell ill. She had been on a visit to her father’s ...”

“... in full colour, has bouffant hair, a big smile and expensive teeth. Johnson, in grainy black and white, wears a black leather jacket, with a pipe jutting rigidly from between his lips and a stare that seems to ask the eternal pub question: ‘What are you looking at?’ In a comment under the article, a disgruntled local posting as ‘muppet ...”