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“... When Darwin died a hundred years ago; he could reasonably have said, ‘Après moi, le déluge,’ because we are still awash with books and ideas for, against and about him. The issue is intellectually enthralling, moves rapidly, and is of practical importance. The Monkey Puzzle is about the origin of man, and, in particular, about the date when the line which led to us separated from that which led to chimpanzees and gorillas ...”

“... This book is about its subtitle: ‘A History of Explanations in Psychology and Physics’. To bring that history up to date, one should point out that this year’s Nobel Prizes in Medicine went to three men honoured for their contribution to our knowledge of the brain: Roger Sperry from Cal Tech and David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel from Harvard. Their discoveries are stunning, counter-intuitive and of no immediate practical consequence ...”

“... work otherwise. No pain, no gain. Feel the burn. Actually, I’d rather not, and the blessed Patrick Wall, neuroscientist and pain doctor, wishes it to be known that pain is almost entirely useless and good for nothing but getting rid of. He cites cancer pain, with the impatience of one who is suffering it himself, as the apogee of ...”

“... attack on Libya. St John-Stevas did not accuse of cowardice those who objected to the attack. Sir Patrick Wall attended to that, referring to Europe’s ‘pussyfootedness’ in combating terrorism, and claiming that ‘if we had refused the United States request, the call for Fortress America would have grown, with very dangerous consequences for ...”

“... Corbière kept the flattened, desiccated, leathery little corpse of a toad nailed to the wall just above the mantelpiece of the family home in Roscoff. The toad lacked the agreeable narcissism of the emblems chosen by most of his contemporaries – swans, albatrosses, skylarks and nightingales – and it had none of the charm of Nerval’s ...”

“... the ads for stairlifts, window cleaners, takeaways.It finished in an A5 sheet Blu-Tacked to the wall:IMPORTANT NUBERS [sic] with the contactsfor their children, two nurses, and the remnantsof a family one continent away: +00 32 etc.The dead lines outgrew the living, the A to Zwent back to A again, an alphabet in countdown,until what remained when we had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In 1978 there were two floods, the second of which, Johnson notes, overran the then unfinished sea wall. There’s a sardonic, defiant fatalism in the way he and the other islanders consider their plight, as well as a certain pride in ‘our wreck’. ‘I wish the damn thing would blow up and we’d be rid of it,’ one of them told Johnson, who speculates ...”

“... The legions have left indelible evidence of their mighty presence, ranging from Hadrian’s Wall to the three-quarters of a million nails unearthed in a Perthshire fort which was abandoned after a few years. Yet no Imperial edicts addressed to Britain survive (probably, it is true, because British archives were out of reach when the most important ...”

“... What​ do we know about St Patrick? Most people could probably place him in Ireland, amid every short cut to Irishness – shamrocks, Guinness, lots of green things – while a little more knowledge may attach to him the legend that he is responsible for Ireland’s lack of snakes, having ordered them all to leave ...”

“... to deserve the contempt of others. Explaining the way of the disciple taking the Path of Blame, Patrick Laude (a professor at Georgetown University and writer on Sufism) suggests that a typical malamati would eagerly confess along with Hamlet: ‘I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not ...”

“... recent years has been the ‘gate’ theory of pain developed in the Sixties by Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall. Discarding the old mechanical ‘fire-alarm’ theory as simplistic, they argued that controls operate all the way from the nerve endings to the brain. When messages from the nerve ends reach the spinal cord, a fine-tuning takes place ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... variations on one another’s words. In his new novel, Mother’s Milk, the central character, Patrick Melrose, tries to explain to his old friend Johnny Hall, a psychoanalyst, about his rage and depression, and about their ancient familial sources. ‘I think you can afford to lose control,’ Johnny counsels ...”

“... ambiguity of the material provokes such a response – a doubt about this novel. In other novels, Patrick White has offered the reader something more obvious to fix the attention, such as Voss’s intense and dominating will. In the absence of an obvious meaning nothing so fixes the attention in The Twyborn Affair. There is a good deal of absence in this ...”