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“... failure. On the strength of that one film I would love to read a thorough life of Ford (such as Joseph McBride managed for Frank Capra, that other fragile hero). The reasons Ford ‘has such defenders’ are amply supplied in the book McBride has now written about him, which shows how we might do better not to understand our enemies too quickly, how even ...”

“... 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and ...”

“... Somerleyton, his ticket satchel slung about him. Later, in a section on the Belgian Congo linking Joseph Conrad (who improved his English by reading the Lowestoft newspapers) with Roger Casement (whom Conrad much admired for his integrity), Sebald remarks on the ‘distinctive ugliness’ of Belgium and the stunted growth of its inhabitants. On one visit to ...”

“... thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here shows that Chatterton’s relations with the book trade after he arrived in London were far busier and more profitable than is commonly supposed. In the early summer of 1770 he was networking at Tom’s and the ...”

“... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...”

“... antedated the Ten Commandments project, as he had spent much of the 1930s on his tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers (the last volume appeared in 1943), immersing himself not only in the Bible itself but in biblical scholarship, early rabbinic interpretation, comparative religion and anthropology. His instrument was perfectly tuned for this quick ...”

“... and expected much from us, one of the first questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’ Journal Richard Holmes describes The Age of Wonder as a ‘relay race of scientific stories’ about the explosion of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first ...”

“... Because the man himself is so ungainly, it is easy to overlook Michael Moore’s voice. Where his body seems ungovernable and a source of embarrassment to him – he often can’t bear to watch himself on screen – his voice is confident, almost suave. There’s a moment in his least known movie, The Big One (1997), where he launches effortlessly into a gravelly imitation of Dylan singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ before reverting, with a chuckle, to his own spoken voice ...”

“... of Conservative ascendancy. This effect was heightened by the defection of the leading radical, Joseph Chamberlain. By the turn of the century the fears had faded: with Gladstone dead, and Chamberlainite imperialism at its zenith, dangerous schemes such as Home Rule seemed to be off the cards. A valuable radical inheritance was there to be won: Lloyd George ...”

“... winning entry in that contest, Harold Pinter’s Proust Screenplay, written in 1972 for Joseph Losey, but never filmed: a brilliant, synoptic, allusive evocation of the whole of A la recherche du temps perdu. Völker Schlöndorf’s film Swann in Love (1983), by comparison, adapted just the second section of Proust’s first volume (about two ...”

“... in English. Until recently it was possible to obtain a Tiranti reprint (sketchily annotated by Joseph Rykwert) of Leoni’s translation of 1726, itself no more than a rendering of the 16th-century Italian translation by Bartoli. Leoni’s version is elegant and learned; but it shows no system in its translation of Alberti’s philosophical terms, and ...”

“... in Henry James for me at the beginning of my time here. ‘Saigon, 1969,’ my friend Larry Joseph said, when I sat him in Leonardo’s coffee bar a block away from campus. ‘Fucking Yucatan,’ I called it, not dismissively but wonderingly, coming in to land here the very first time, in the expectation of finding something more built up, and seeing ...”

“... Server: ‘It is almost me.’ Again, when she read the script of The Barefoot Contessa, she told Joseph Mankiewicz: ‘I’m not an actress, but I think I understand this girl. She’s a lot like me.’ Gardner’s increasing identification with her screen performances is not a surprise. This was how the star factory worked. They called Gardner the ...”

“... at school in Kiev) and Platonov, until they were all swept away by Solzhenitsyn.I like to quote Joseph Brodsky’s lines from ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the 20th century, when we already/have the 19th, my colleague would stare fixedly at his fork or his ...”

“... the best translations are often the plain prose trots by scholars like Simon Karlinsky and Michael Makin which sometimes achieve a rough vernacular rightness by being simply true. Kto ne prokis – okrys’sja! If you’re not rotten – turn rat! (Makin) Tsvetaeva has been as fortunate in her post-humous fate as she was wretchedly unlucky in ...”