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“... 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 idiots have art in ...”

“... authentically modern prose, comparable to the fiction of that same generation by Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty. Other auto-biographical writers (or non-writers) like Barry and Breen had produced naive, highly-coloured morality tales, written in an idiom derived from the 19th-century nationalist tracts excoriated by Yeats. O’Malley ...”

“... photography, Latin American mail art, an archival dive into the New York poet and MoMA curator Frank O’Hara, and so on.For the most part art-historical terms – Fauvism, Cubism and the rest – are avoided in wall texts in favour of general rubrics like ‘Abstraction and Utopia’ and ‘Design for Modern Life’, and inclusive settings like ‘Paris ...”

“... thoughtfully about from one clan grave to another while the present Stuart claimant to the throne, Michael James Alexander, was being interviewed by BBC Scotland. He is a gentle Belgian socialist who once worked as a waiter in Edinburgh but has taken up PR. ‘I felt it was important to attend,’ he told the cameras. ‘Ethnic cleansing was carried out after ...”

“... There are commendable extensions to the New Art Centre at Roche Court, to a nearby house by Michael Manser and to the Council House in Salisbury. Douglas Stephen’s David Murray John Tower in central Swindon is one of the finest buildings in Britain of its age (early 1970s) – a sleek homage to ...”

“... to Gelpi, plumbs great depths. Despite its uniquely complicated motives and its unusually frank statements of intent, living in Time is in fact the logical outcome of Gelpi’s methods and beliefs, already demonstrated and outlined in his two important books on the American poetic tradition, The Tenth Muse (1975) and A Coherent Splendour (1987). In ...”

“... is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights. We learn that Frank Capra, for example, is not the populist he is supposed to be: ‘His politics are . . . a kind of middle-class noblesse oblige.’ Keaton is not a rebel or a clown but a person who discovers that ‘setting up residence in the world’ is much harder than ...”

“... and has been followed by Mark Thornton Burnett’s edition of the plays for Everyman in 1999, and Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey’s for Penguin in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the ...”

“... Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles bar and had a very frank chat, in the course of which Worsthorne said that while he could easily look on, say, Asians, as equals, he found it very tough to extend the same indulgence to the natives of the Dark Continent. When I told him I was off to interview Sir Roy Welensky, once ...”

“... media. We encounter it all the way from Taxi Driver and Mulholland Drive to The Diary of Anne Frank and Amy Winehouse, from the classical hubris of O.J. Simpson to the collective hubris of ecological disaster. With Freud and the existentialists, tragedy continues to colonise philosophy, as David Kornhaber points out. In a fluid, fragmented culture hostile ...”

“... part of The Emigrants, the first of Sebald’s novels to be translated from his native German (by Michael Hulse) and published in Britain, where Sebald has lived since 1966. In that episode, Sebald describes the life of Max Ferber (based loosely on the painter Frank Auerbach), a Jewish boy sent to England in 1939 to escape ...”

“... been no difficulty in showing that, in these memoirs as in her career, Thatcher has been neither frank nor humble. Mrs Thatcher appears to suffer from a quite advanced form of egomania, or megalomania, or both; and it is genuinely difficult for her not to see everyone else as either her opponent or an instrument of her will. The former are immediately ...”

“... raised a question that wouldn’t go away for Auden: the importance, or the impotence, of being frank. Discussing Peer Gynt in The Dyer’s Hand, he wrote that ‘both the dreamer and the madman are in earnest; neither is capable of play-acting.’ The dreamer is ‘like the movie-goer who writes abusive letters to the actor he has seen playing a ...”

“... appreciation of the art of our time than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on ...”

“... of the emperor’s new clothes. For the handful of liberals – Lord Scarman, Anthony Lester, Michael Zander – who have been arguing for decades that we need to have our rights and the government’s powers written down and invigilated by independent judges, the Nineties are looking like the moment of truth. That they were right about the fragility of ...”