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“... Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming ...”

“... be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more difficult. His private life was extraordinary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... biography, do I. Will Rogers was billed as ‘America’s Greatest Humorist’, the successor to Mark Twain. But the legendary examples of his humour – ‘We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile’; ‘My epitaph: Here lies Will Rogers. Politicians turned honest and he starved to death’ – sound flat ...”

“... ceiling – in particular, Jeremiah. Such inapposite quotations should be considered neither the mark of Mulready’s ambition nor the measure of his failure. As genre, this is a kind illustration of the importunate self-advertisement found in young poets. As something more than genre, it reminds us of the long-lived idea that a studious application to high ...”

“... course, and it doesn’t get better than Beard’s. An ordinary village is founded at a propitious ford on a river with good access to the sea. For six hundred years, it continues to look pretty much like the neighbours with whom it has annual inconclusive punch-ups, as they all become rudimentary city-states with a taste for Greek luxury imports. Then ...”

“... Pickford faints on the set of a movie. The history of the movies is used throughout the novel to mark the passage of 20th-century time. When Clarence finally induces his superiors (credited with very persuasive though unavailing arguments against him) to let him resign his ministry, he becomes a silent movie buff and so a conduit for information on the ...”

“... an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines seemed the best way to apply new technology in order to make the things people wanted at the lowest prices. The main drawback was manning: people were ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels ...”

“... for a while as Goldman’s secretary) to Peggy Guggenheim – as well as Edwin and Willa Muir, Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Hemingway. She crops up in everyone’s memoirs, and seems to have been very close to Guggenheim, but she wasn’t just a hanger-on, and played a significant part in getting Barnes’s Nightwood into ...”

“... mix of idealism and opportunism; an artist on the loose in the public world who made his mark on the first half of the 20th century. Following Bertram Wolfe’s political portrait of 1939, most of the reassessments have lain hidden in scholarly monographs, and Rivera is chiefly remembered these days as the husband of Frida Kahlo, Gender ...”

“... where we worship as art one of the dynamics that gives life to the economic system of the West, mark the supreme achievement of capitalism.’ The book makes connections between evidence drawn from a very wide range of modern research. For this reason alone it is of great value, but anyone who is curious to pursue Goldthwaite’s sources will find the ...”

“... collective traditions while legitimating competitive struggle. The major party Conventions mark the midway stage of the election. And so, while sounding full of fight and confident of victory, the acceptance speech must also bind up the wounds of strife within the party and anticipate the more peaceful tones of post-election rhetoric: the loser’s ...”