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“... careful, non-intrusive touch of the directors (Mark Sandrich for Top Hat and Shall We Dance and George Stevens for Swing Time); and there are the differences among Irving Berlin (Top Hat), Jerome Kern (Swing Time) and George Gershwin (Shall We Dance) as composers. There is some amazing dialogue (in this case by Allan ...”

“... 1939-45. Max Hastings’s Victory in Europe is ‘brightened’ by stills from color film shot by George Stevens, a Hollywood director (he later made Shane). Stevens ran an official unit attached to the Allied Armies’ Supreme Headquarters, but military procedures called for all movie coverage to be in 35 mm ...”

“... working with most of the best Hollywood directors of the time: Hawks, Zinnemann, William Wyler, George Stevens, Hitchcock. In ten or so of his 17 films, he is, by anybody’s reckoning, flawless. It’s not surprising that John Ford never showed an interest; the ‘manly’ directors with whom Clift did work suspected he was gay, and, in John ...”

“... to paint.’In their new biography, which is nearly as long as the other three put together, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan devote nine pages to the time Bacon spent outside London. Like previous biographers, they are hampered by lack of evidence, so they have to improvise. ‘Silence can be a great surprise,’ they write. ‘Day after day of silence. No ...”

“... Asked in 1933 what his favourite among his own poems was, Wallace Stevens said he liked best ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, from Harmonium (1923). The work ‘wears a deliberately commonplace costume’, Stevens said, ‘and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry ...”

“... Palance by Alan Ladd in Shane is exquisite, but Shane as a whole is a phoney. (But its director, George Stevens, did direct a musical that’s a serious candidate for greatness: Swing Time.) And the problem of evaluating the makers is vastly complicated, as it is with the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, by the fact that the creation is usually ...”

“... had understood of Taylor’s screen appeal was A Place in the Sun, a 1951 noirish film directed by George Stevens and co-starring Montgomery Clift. It tells the story of George Eastman (Clift), the poor relation of a wealthy family who is torn between two women: Shelley Winters as Alice, who works in the same factory ...”

“... likely to be, as The armies waited for a verbal error With all the instruments for causing pain. Stevens, the elderly butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s third novel, The Remains of the Day, would never be so vulgar as to price anyone’s shoes, but much of his earlier life was discreetly spent in the presence of substantial men exchanging views, at a time of ...”

“... for Dylan Thomas and the New Apocalypse poets, but his real coup had been to get several Wallace Stevens poems published in Britain, much to Stevens’s pleasure. Meanwhile, his own poems kept coming, and by 1944 a Selected, The Glass Tower, came out, expensively illustrated by Lucian Freud. He got married to a woman ...”

“... story, which he tells again in My Last Breath. There is a dinner in Buñuel’s honour at George Cukor’s house in Hollywood in 1972. Fifteen famous directors are there, including John Ford, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Mulligan, George Stevens, Robert Wise, William Wyler, Billy Wilder. Hitchcock sits next to ...”

“... for the Radical Republicans, especially their leader in the House of Representatives, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. Born with a club foot, Stevens was depicted by earlier historians as ‘the crippled, fanatical personification’, in John F. Kennedy’s words, ‘of the extremes of the Radical Republican ...”

“... writers are the best of their kind or jewels of their country. Many of them are American: Whitman, Stevens, Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Berryman, Cummings, and I suppose Auden. The English are Larkin and Betjeman. Russians and other foreigners include Pushkin, Blok, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, Canetti, Milosz and Popa. The only difference I ...”

“... irritated Marianne Moore, who repeatedly insists on the virtue of accuracy, whether in Wallace Stevens’s poems or in Ralph Kirkpatrick’s harpsichord playing (‘gossamer precision’) or, indeed, in translation, at which she showed herself to be exceptionally good. Still, her editors have, as they claim, fulfilled Eliot’s 1959 prediction that ‘one ...”

“... fact that all a working man would ever do with a large award of damages was buy a pub. Robert Stevens in a footnote cites a nice antidote from a law lord in 1833: ‘Here is a contract made by a fishmonger and a carrier of fish who know their business, and whether it is just and reasonable is to be settled by me who am neither fishmonger nor carrier, nor ...”

“... this country. Discovered at random, long and clandestinely puzzled over, the few pieces by Pound, Stevens, Moore, Crane and others that came to his attention gradually revealed that there were other ways of writing verse than those prescribed either by the Dylan Thomas school of apocalyptic word-chimers, or by the Movement, in whose manifestos he detected ...”