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“... of the film.’ Roud lists his own ‘pantheon’ of favourite directors. Some are acknowledged masters like Dreyer, Renoir, Bresson, Olmi or Satyajit Ray. Others include less major talents – Vigo, Cocteau, Antonioni, Straub. But how does Lubitsch qualify? Or Sternberg, Hitchcock, Hawks and Orson Welles? Their inclusion seems to me like bracketing Conrad ...”

“... and this is very well done by Anthony Veiller for the Siodmak movie, with uncredited help from John Huston and Richard Brooks. The Siegel film, written by Gene Coon, borrows the plot from the first but transposes scenes and careers: New Jersey, Philadelphia and boxing become Miami, California and car-racing. The stars change too: Burt Lancaster and Ava ...”

“... some dignity and is used to structure an already excellent fiction. Silence among the Weapons, John Arden’s first novel, deals with the mysterious and violent contortions which led up to the disintegration of the Roman Republic in the first century BC. The leading characters are Marius, Sulla, Cinna, Drusus and Mithridates Eupator, except that they ...”

“... as actors. She wrote plays, wrote poems, had love affairs. She was an admirer of that witty poet, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and wrote an elegy on his death. Large was his Fame, but short his Glorious Race, Like young Lucretius and dy’d apace. So early Roses fade, so over all They cast their fragrant scents, then softly fall, While all the scatter’d ...”

“... others the constructions of dishonest, mean-spirited score-settlers. This key office of the new masters exudes smugness, oafishness and fear (might it be their turn next?). Every so often, a clerk is winched up towards the ceiling on a precarious pulley system, a file is taken down, and another execution is assured. Once your dossier has reached the Bureau ...”

“... The​ evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith believed that his former supervisor J.B.S. Haldane ‘wasn’t an ordinary mortal’. Haldane moved between the fields of physiology, biochemistry, genetics and evolutionary biology, making contributions to each that would ‘satisfy half a dozen ordinary mortals’, and also wrote scientific articles and books aimed at non-specialists ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... used to accord only to the great imaginative writers of their own time? Why have these masters produced so many eager disciples? Why has Literary Theory (thus capitalised) become an independent field rather than a serviceable set of working assumptions that enables critical commentary? In Patrick Parrinder’s account of this major change in ...”

“... up – draws so much attention to itself that it becomes portentous instead of light-handed. The masters of this kind of narrative draw no attention to it at all. In Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’ the pair have met, found themselves making love, and then taken a cab along the sea-front and sat on a bench together in the dawn. Yalta was barely ...”

“... and English, Dissenters and Anglicans, colonial subjects and British imperialists, slaves and masters, women and men, poor and rich, radicals and loyalists? While she acknowledges the importance of all these, Colley makes rather less of them than I would find appropriate: the category ‘ordinary people’, carefully used at some times, becomes at others ...”

“... climax. Unlike other American cities, LA has a police chief who is independent of his political masters. He has the equivalent of academic tenure and cannot be dismissed (without extraordinary cause) by his boss, the Mayor. This is to prevent the Police being used for political ends. Chief Daryl F. Gates rose through the ranks to the highest position in the ...”

“... James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a British representative at Strasbourg. But it is no surprise to me that in over twenty years as an ...”

“... The justification for this survey of a single year is made in a nod to Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, who described 1931-32 as his annus mirabilis. It was a hugely productive year, in part because of the new work Picasso was creating for the retrospective, in part, it’s claimed, because of his relationship with the 22-year-old Marie-Thérèse ...”

“... text, endlessly repeated. Even at their most intimate and speculative, the King’s Gallery masters – Leonardo chasing a cat at play, Polidoro da Caravaggio studying the head of a Doubting Thomas from a hand’s-breadth distance – had entourages to impress and to whom we owe the sheets’ preservation.The difference I chiefly sense is that artists ...”

“... he can never achieve the final consummation. Dreams are for dreaming about. The Hollywood dream-masters got it right when they had Judy Garland playing a star-struck teenager gazing at a pin-up of Clark Gable and singing ‘If you were the only boy in the world’. It’s if, not when. Mix them up and you remember the story of Gable resting on set minus his ...”