Search Results

“... of the protean nature of Powell’s gifts of intellect as well as the odd shape of his career that Patrick Cosgrave decided to write of his subject’s ‘Lives’. This is a mistake, since Powell’s life has been very much of a piece. The failure, in the conventional sense, of his political career arose from the same personal traits and gifts as the ...”

“... them he had a rather successful social life. As he grew older, younger men whom he liked (Hockney, Patrick Procktor among others) seem to have found his company agreeable. But there are too many notes of nights with the auto-erotic device and the whisky bottle for his last entry, written while waiting for his overdose to take effect, to seem entirely what, in ...”

“... various forms of sleaze are associated with the names of Cecil Parkinson, Nicholas Fairbairn and Patrick Nicholls. Leaving aside the proper ‘constitutional’ resignations of Lord Carrington, Leon Brittan and Michael Heseltine, and the not so proper ministerial non-resignations that cannot be mentioned for fear of the libel laws, we can still see that the ...”

“... author who died after 1925. The proposed reform is particularly tantalising for scholars like Patrick Parrinder, who has been working for some years on a revised team-edition of H.G. Wells (died 1946, by old UK regulation due to enter the public domain in 1996; by new EU Directive, 2016). There is, Parrinder plausibly argues, a crying need for improved ...”

“... how intemperate passions are rooted in a heavy loam of the commonplace and the customary. In Carn, Patrick McCabe describes three decades in the life of a small Irish community. Carn is a small town situated half a mile from the Irish border, a town honoured in Republican annals for the heroism of Commandant Matt Dolan, shot dead in 1922 during a raid on the ...”

“... Award, the most prominent prize for first novels in Australia; it was described by David Marr, Patrick White’s biographer, as ‘astonishingly talented’, and by Jill Kitson of the ABC as ‘a searingly truthful account of terrible wartime deeds that is also an imaginative work of extraordinary redemptive power’. Assuming, as we all did, that the ...”

“... to leave it out in their art.’ Critical debate was lively and healthily factionalised, with Patrick Heron upholding a formalist approach in opposition to John Berger’s advocacy of realism. Berger not only promoted figurative realists at every opportunity in his pieces for the New Statesman, but was also involved with the three Looking Forward ...”

“... will be said. The effect is the exact opposite of the comic principle as met with in the novels of Patrick Hamilton, say, or of Anthony Powell (who is rather engagingly referred to, by one of the Welshmen, as an author presumably Welsh, and who remarked that more marriages come to grief from envy than from jealousy). This is quite an important matter. Jane ...”

“... divorce. He paid for Tilly to be represented by a counsel of her own choosing, and she chose Sir Patrick Hastings, a star performer whose brutal cross-examination technique had won him many cases. Edward’s account of the court proceedings is effective but very one-sided. One is scarcely aware of Tilly’s presence. Edward spent six days in the witness box ...”

“... art’ or pastiche: not until now, though, has it happened to the comic, which in the light of Patrick McCabe’s torrential and compelling The Butcher Boy is eminently suited to such treatment. Consider the Beano, for example, a series of moral tales repeated in only slightly modified form week after week. In a very simple way comics are about crime and ...”

“... the story of a Parisian rake in pursuit of an elusive scent (a vein mined far more rigorously in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume) alternates with a frankly embarrassing stream-of-consciousness monologue about a drugged rock musician living in mid-Seventies London. Neither of these adds much to Calvino’s glory: especially since, given their simultaneous ...”

“... apparently completely satisfied for the moment’. Are cars really so sexually alluring? Patrick Keiller suggests a connection between conventional car design (engine at the front driving the rear wheels) and traditional masculinity or heterosexuality, on the one hand, and unconventional design and unconventional sexuality, on the other. Let’s ...”

“... had no such vision. They would be blamed for ‘losing’ China. One of the great merits of Patrick Tyler’s history of this relationship is its down-to-earthness. He footnotes Li Peng’s diatribe thus: It is likely that Li Peng invoked the ‘losing China’ argument because he understood how powerful it was in domestic American politics. After so ...”

“... accused me of letting my needle get stuck’ – mild, in all conscience, by comparison with Patrick Owens, who is remembered for calling him, a couple of years earlier, ‘a remorseless and fatuous nitpicker’. This is surely unfair: what evidence could there be to justify ...”

“... a writer at the other end of his career from Illis. Here, too, it concerns love and socialisation. Patrick White’s Three Uneasy Pieces uses, as did his previous work Memoirs of Many in One, but more concisely, a doubling and multiplication of personalities and grotesque flights of fancy to explore some seamy aspects of his own life and imagination. His ...”