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“... Elizabethans internalised and used to make sense of their world. Here the scholarship of Patrick Collinson, to which Lake’s Bad Queen Bess? is a critical response, was transformative, showing nothing less than a politics of emergency, with privy council and parliaments pressing to execute Mary Queen of Scots and mobilise loyal Protestant subjects ...”

“... powers continued to enjoy over Africa. On Césaire’s death in 2008, the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau admitted that he ‘never understood why the author of these writings, which had liberated so many warriors in Africa, was not for the independence of Martinique’.Crucially, Césaire and Senghor started out as poets rather than ...”

“... and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate spirit and, as Patrick O’Brian wrote in the LRB, ‘that fine zeal and conviction which arises from original research’. It might have been called definitive, but, as this superb new edition reminds us, history never sleeps, and nor does the sea. Evidence from the shifting ...”

“... timelessness, relished but without striving for effect. We are in the world of Briggflatts, of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ or Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. Let me quote two descriptions from the novel, one of an interior, the other of a meal taken outdoors. In the first, Bjartur’s son has been tapping on the roof and squeaking, to get ...”

“... reports. Among the documents, a detective inspector discovered something of interest in Patrick Armstrong’s ‘personal file’: a set of typed notes containing many handwritten amendments. In their amended form, the typed notes were an almost word-for-word match with manuscript notes of three interviews with Armstrong on 4, 5 and 6 December ...”

“... David Wright, ‘a literary instrument of precision’, and a long-time friend and supporter; Patrick Kavanagh, who was to be approached ‘with a large whisky in one’s outstretched hand’; George Barker, first seen ‘wearing a check suit and cap, all very new, as if in the course of an attempt to prove that he was not a poet but a bookmaker’. But ...”

“... interior life for his character: it’s a problem he tries to side-step by giving his character, Patrick Bateman, a 27-year-old Wall Street super-yuppie who goes around gruesomely murdering people in his spare time, no internal life at all. Bateman’s head is entirely filled with things like this: Price seems nervous and edgy and I have no desire to ask ...”

“... Only one of these five memoirs can be fairly called secular – quite unconcerned with the consolations of religion, untroubled by the complications. This is From Early Life by the oldest of the five authors, the novelist and scientist ‘William Cooper’: he was born in 1910 and brought up (as Harry Hoff) in the town of Crewe in Cheshire. Seniors in his family were determined chapel-goers, but Cooper-Hoff looks back at his childhood, over eighty years, with the quiet smile of a tolerant agnostic: his light, amused impressions illustrate the way England has become more secular than other nations, during this century ...”

“... Revival’ is the title of one important section of the book, containing essays by Patrick Minford, Martin Holmes and John Redwood. Minford recapitulates an already familiar analysis of the three parts of Thatcher’s economic programme, ‘the conquest of inflation, the promotion of efficiency, and the defeat of unemployment’, which were ...”

“... well understand how upsetting this must have been, particularly since O’Brien’s adopted son, Patrick, is black, and O’Brien has a quite faultless record on all questions of race and apartheid. But the fact is that, though he writes a pretty good general summary of the situation in South Africa, he is a little out of his depth there. In particular, he ...”

“... Cambridge introductions to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars and biographers. Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers ...”

“... kept her own style lucidly straight-forward and informative, though not without the odd blunder: Patrick Kavanagh may have been the ‘leading poet of the Irish Republic after Yeats’, but the honour loses some of its lustre when we remember that Ireland did not become a republic until 1949, ten years after Yeats’s death. Yeats, incidentally, gets nothing ...”

“... version of it promulgated after 1918 by Raymond Unwin, most humane of metropolitan planners. Patrick Abercrombie, Unwin’s spiritual successor and author of the two famous plans for London issued in 1943-44, also did well, under harder circumstances and greater pressure. Sheppard is wrong to condemn London’s high-rise housing without also ...”

“... taste was probably on the lowbrow side’. He shows not a sign of having read Patrick Piggott’s charming book The Innocent Diversion, of 1979, which establishes, from the sheet music she owned and copied, that Jane Austen was a highly proficient keyboard performer and identifies, as by Daniel Gottlieb Steilbelt, the noisy pianoforte ...”

“... 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 came ...”