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“... 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 ...”

“... as much in rent and the landowners felt no duty to their tenants: after all, as the Countess of Sutherland wrote in 1799, tenants who refused to enlist in ‘her’ regiment, the 93rd, ‘need no longer be considered a credit to Sutherland, or any advantage over sheep or any useful animal’. ...”

“... historical novel in him, should he care to write it. For In the Skin of a Lion he takes as hero Patrick Lewis, a second-generation Canadian of rooted British origins. The opening sections relate Patrick’s early life on an Ontario farm in the second decade of the century. Among all the vivid first impressions of ...”

“... before. It was a rare intrusion by an 18th-century lyric into the UK top ten. ‘Lochaber no more/Sutherland no more/Lewis no more/Skye no more’, sang the Proclaimers, reprising the sentiment a few lines later as ‘Bathgate no more/Linwood no more/Methil no more/Irvine no more’. These were towns where big car plants and steel fabrication factories had ...”

“... entertainer’.(Dickens was stigmatised with the same term by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition.) Patrick Parrinder has been opposing such anti-Wellsian prejudice for the best part of a quarter of a century. His opposition takes the form of scholarly works which patiently mount the case for critical respect. Parrinder’s contributions include the Critical ...”

“... there may be the good reason that the author has something important to lose if he’s recognised. Patrick Mann’s novels (Steal Big, Dog Day Afternoon) carry the front-cover information that ‘Patrick Mann is the pseudonym of a former US Army Intelligence agent who has for many years been a crime reporter for a nationwide ...”

“... do with two madmen now, not one.’   ‘You mean Marcus is mad too?’   ‘No, he means Patrick is mad too.’   ‘What do you mean?’ It takes a moment to work out that three people are talking about two other people. They are, it emerges, the novel’s five principals; all men and each representative of some mode of knowledge or creative ...”

“... the only full-length novel devoted to olfaction originates, like A Rebours, in an alien culture. Patrick Süskind’s Perfume was translated from the original German and published in Britain and America in 1986. The novel (originally put out in hardback by Hamish Hamilton) neatly partners Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant. Set in pre-Revolution France, it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the ...”

“... nudge strings of garlic and piles of melons. The sources of his style were there in the Thirties: Sutherland’s spiky way of drawing spiky things from which Minton removed much of the threat; romantic mountebanks from Tchelitchew and blue-and-pink Picasso which he made less melancholy-histrionic. His atmosphere is a little thunderous, but not to the point of ...”

“... infantile fascination with the shiny consumer goods of corrupt Western capitalism. A mysterious Patrick Thunderjet, an American diplomat (or spy?) with a taste for stylish clothes, imported whisky and big gas-guzzling cars, intrudes into the story. The action skitters all over the place, settling at one bizarre point on the campus of Sussex ...”

“... judgment and the judgment abroad arises frequently in post-colonial literatures, and the case of Patrick White illustrates its complexities. First, how ‘Australian’ is White? He was born in London but of parents who were both Australians of grazier stock. He returned to Australia during his first year of life and lived in Sydney until the age of 13. So ...”

“... is rather in two minds about Lowood/Cowan Bridge. She scrupulously notes the major anomaly: would Patrick Brontë – ‘naturally kind-hearted’ – have kept his children at a school only fifty miles away where they were being tortured literally to death? Fraser concludes that Charlotte’s account was ‘clouded by emotion’ but ‘somewhere close to the ...”

“... conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins when he had finished a somewhat similar job for Hamlyn. Both Urdang and T.H. Long were earlier on the Random House Dictionary. All very cosy. But while it desirably makes for shared knowledge and a solid ...”