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“... psychological depth. Two other front-rank directors who favoured him were Frank Capra and John Ford: Capra served Stewart extremely well and was more than reciprocally rewarded three times, in You Can’t Take It with You, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late ...”

“... all that arduous tiling. He was writing at a time when such masters as Henry James, Conrad and Ford were agonising a lot about modern technique, but although he seems to have found the business of technique quite interesting – or rather, although he made a few knowing nods in that direction – what he really liked was to get on with his solid and ...”

“... they were following, in some measure and according to their capacity, the brilliant example of Robert Graves, whose coming to maturity as a poet was a matter of saying a decisive ‘goodbye’ not only to the war but to all ghosts and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in Criterion, with ...”

“... now admired, though not for their technical stunts, have gone in for ‘experiment’, from James, Ford and Conrad and Joyce to, say, Golding and Ian McEwan. Lawrence saw how much might be done in a novel, how free it could be of constraints, how apt to the business of making it new; the novel was protean, insisting on its own virtually infinite ...”

“... make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. The birds evoked in her elegy for Robert Lowell, ‘North Haven’, have no trouble performing their elegiac function: The Goldfinches are back, or others like them, and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song, pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes. More distracting is the ...”

“... time.’ (Dave Van Ronk said that.) That must be how every interviewer feels – except, it seems, Robert Shelton. It’s 1966: Dylan is talking to Shelton, whose book about him he has agreed to countenance, if not to ‘authorise’. He says something about his relationship with Joan Baez, and then asks: ‘Can you write this in your book? If you ...”

“... the revolution/regime change’ policy than the US ambassador to Syria from 2010 to 2014, Robert Ford. He believed in the policy of backing the ‘moderate’ elements fighting the regime and unhesitatingly called for them to be armed. But he drew the line at the more extreme jihadis, and notably at Jabhat al-Nusra, unable to accept that the US ...”

“... and election, the operations of inscrutable, perhaps divine, plots. Theodore Dreiser, reviewing Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, said that if he’d had a chance to advise Ford he would have told him how to avoid obscurity and muddle: begin the story at the beginning and continue ...”

“... guests with more than just the keys to their rooms. According to Thompson’s latest biographer, Robert Polito, even as a teenager Thompson ‘moonlighted as a bootlegger, a drug peddler, a grifter, a pimp and a male escort’. His extra-curricular activities often added as much as three hundred dollars to his weekly wage but, at the same time, demanded the ...”

“... gave much the same effect. They could even be found in the parlours of fishmongers. In his 2001 Ford Lectures, Chris Dyer suggested that workers in late medieval England ‘enjoyed a standard of living that was not to be attained again until the late 19th century’. So was the plague the end of something, or the beginning? Was it the devastating calamity ...”

“... understanding view, and may even have accused Owen of cowardice, a slur that found its way into Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. But the army should be given credit for the treatment Owen received at hospitals in France and Hampshire, and then at Craiglockhart, where Arthur Brock implemented a regime that he called ‘ergotherapy’, a kind of ...”

“... reminder of primitive and innocent reading experiences. Something very similar was aimed at by Robert Louis Stevenson, and in Our Ancestors Calvino has a beautiful description of the Stevensonian romance: ‘To him, writing meant translating an invisible text containing the quintessential fascination of all adventures, all mysteries, all conflicts of will ...”

“... central part in the revolution in molecular biology that one might have expected seems inferior to Robert Olby’s in his entry for Bernal in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and he shows insufficient interest in the thinking that turned so many eminent figures in the evolutionary life sciences to Marxism, or rather, more surprisingly, to the ...”

“... Robert Harris’s first novel, Fatherland (1992), was a counterfactual historical thriller set in Nazi Germany in 1964. In the alternative reality of the book, Germany defeated the Soviet Union in the Caucasus in 1943, lured the Royal Navy to its destruction after learning that the British had cracked the Enigma code, and intimidated the United States into signing a peace treaty by successfully testing an atom bomb and launching an intercontinental V3 rocket across the Atlantic ...”

“... hailed in a copy of La Poussière de soleils as a ‘modern Julius Caesar’ – Proust, Colette, Robert Desnos, Pierre Loti ‘dont on ne doit prononcer le nom qu’à genoux’), self-promoting publicity handouts, details of his extravagant theatrical ventures, press clippings describing his roulotte, a luxury caravan he had custom-built and of which he was ...”