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“... I wonder how many culture-pilgrims have journeyed to Martinique since Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992, to see whether a shanty town of that name really exists. The novel may be a lush documentary or it may be a historical romance: we can’t be sure. In any case, it is likely to change the way we think about the lives and circumstances of millions of people living on the periphery of large cities in underdeveloped parts of the world ...”

“... patient, it holds out against every effort of good will. Nothing Joyce said about it is much help. Patrick Parrinder’s book is a fairly straightforward introduction to Joyce, based on two congenially related emphases. The first is that Joyce’s work as a whole, and Ulysses in particular, feature ‘a poetics of the body’. In a letter of 1921, Joyce told ...”

“... Alfred Aloysius Watson was five years senior to Conan Doyle at Stonyhurst; that the eminent Sir Patrick Heron Watson was almost his contemporary in the Edinburgh Medical School; and that Sir Thomas Watson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society some ten years before William Budd, Conan Doyle’s partner in general practice as a young man. A Sherlock ...”

“... get the utmost funniness out of it. Hughes’s narrator is an overweight government employee named Patrick Weymouth, incompletely divorced from his wife and unsatisfactorily entangled with his secretary, whose present task – rather vaguely defined – is to draft a report on the state of culture in modern Britain, with emphasis on current children’s ...”

“... Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage undertaken by thousands of Irish men and women each year. For three days they fast and pray, deprive themselves of sleep, and walk barefoot round the station ‘beds’ – circles of rough stones said to ...”

“... to William Blake – nevertheless, I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End. Patrick White says somewhere that there is an intangible difference in the air of places where there has been intense suffering, that you can never get rid of the memory that pain imprints on the atmosphere. London’s river runs through Downriver like a ...”

“... beginning with John Foxe and William Camden in her own time, and extending across the centuries to Patrick Collinson and David Starkey in our own, have examined Elizabeth’s reign from a variety of angles, analysing its various subtle strategies and compromises, attempting to evaluate what it achieved. Dobson and Watson, by contrast, are concerned less with ...”

“... Brunswick Town Hall, an inner suburb of Melbourne. It was to be addressed by the Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson, on the theme of reconciliation. Knowing the unpunctuality of left-wing events, I put off driving down Sydney Road until a quarter of an hour before the talk was due to start: a bad mistake. It took twenty minutes to get through the queues and find ...”

“... that they ‘present an unpleasing exterior’. The ‘two Scottish doctors’, Alexander and Patrick Russell, explained in 1792 that it was particularly the height of the walls which made the streets appear so ‘gloomy’: ‘little better than alleys winding among the melancholy walls of nunneries’. The people of Aleppo, on the other hand, were ...”

“... won’t go on extending for ever. Both films are written by Tom O’Connor and directed by Patrick Hughes. And both star Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson, though in the second case the verb is far too feeble. I’m not sure any other actor could play a murderous villain and get so many laughs. When I saw the first of the two movies I thought I was ...”

“... announced, he appeared on Channel 4’s Late Night Poker, seated at the table with Anthony Holden, Patrick Marber, Al Alvarez and Stephen Fry. It was a close, colourful game – Holden was the wiliest of the players and picked up seven grand. The stakes will be higher on Booker night, but it’s hard to imagine that Channel 4’s live broadcast from Guildhall ...”

“... who pursued a vendetta against both Dad and Jr (and lost his job the second time around); Patrick Buchanan, whose demagoguery in the 1992 primaries distracted the homophobic, sexist and racist elements of the GOP base; Ross Perot, an old friend whose conspiracy theories caused him to turn on Bush and tilted the 1992 election to Clinton; Saddam ...”

“... and political irrelevance: Julian Barnes saw how bad things threatened to become when he reviewed Patrick Marnham’s book about the magazine – a kind of ‘Private Eye at 21’ – in the LRB in 1982 (‘the radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of every Sloane Ranger’). Four years later, Ingrams resigned and the little ...”

“... and tripod. There’s another machine gun among a cluster of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s sculptures. Patrick Keiller’s 2012 installation The Robinson Institute (which also involved the filmmaker trawling the Tate archives) supplies several apposite works, among them Leonard Rosoman’s 1942 painting Bomb Falling into Water. In the press release for Phantom ...”

“... to judge from the views of journalists who’ve worked there since the invasion. Our own man Patrick Cockburn believes it’s a ‘great mistake to go with American units and report on any Iraqi city’ because local people can’t talk frankly in front of the military. But Cockburn is clearly outnumbered by reporters who see embedding as useful. At ...”