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“... disappears when you look inward. The chaos within is one of the major themes in the fiction of Richard Ford. What engages him is the churning of the conscious self, as changeable as the weather on an iffy day. What kind of a day is such a day? Soft or threatening? What kind of people were Ford’s mother and ...”

“... The first two sentences of Richard Ford’s seventh novel have the ring of permanence about them: ‘First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.’ They encapsulate not just Canada’s events, but its mood and style, the balance of sensational goings-on with a ruminative, rueful delivery ...”

“... Richard Ford​ is sceptical about character. He thinks it changeable, provisional, unpredictable, irresolute and ‘decidedly unwhole’, which makes things tricky for a novelist. You send a man to see his girlfriend in the expectation that she’ll dump him and she tells him how sweet he is. You don’t know where you are with people ...”

“... you lose all hope,’ he says, ‘you can always find it again.’ And you sense that both he and Richard Ford would shake their heads if you were to read the novel as the dramatic monologue of a character whose optimism is merely an inversion of Richard Yates-style pessimism or a quality he’s been given to emphasise ...”

“... Richard Ford’s narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sports-writer. This was the making of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist. At odd moments in The Sportswriter, Frank looks back on his abandoned literary career ...”

“... painters, Velázquez was the only one who, to be fully appreciated, had to be seen in Spain. Richard Ford, in his Handbook for Travellers in Spain, had made the same point two years earlier. He conceded that Murillo was more successful ‘in delineations of female beauty, the ideal, and holy subjects’, but Velázquez’s ‘representation of ...”

“... and not long after, she made her first appearance on the stage in Dublin. She was soon taken up by Richard Daly, an unscrupulous theatre-manager, who seduced her, and by whom she bore her first child. By then, she had left for England, and was working for Tate Wilkinson’s Yorkshire theatre company which travelled the northern circuit. Between 1782 and ...”

“... wins. But only in such mean backstreets, or in a war or wilderness, can a man become a macho hero. Richard Ford’s Harry Quinn has come to the Mexican city of Oaxaca to buy his ex-lover Rae’s brother Sonny out of jail. Sonny has been found in a hotel room with a lot of cocaine. The dealer he was running for believes Sonny was double-crossing him. The ...”

“... He had said that he ‘used to live in the Paradise Valley in Montana with my literary friends Richard Ford and Thomas McGuane’. Some weeks later, I met Richard Ford at a wedding, and I asked him about Harris. Ford squinted and said: ‘Don Harris . . . Don Harris ...”

“... could go to the pictures with you’), and their shock at discovering Flannery O’Connor and Richard Ford. Unlike some small American colleges which aspire to be the Oxford of the Ozarks, plus royaliste que le roi, Birmingham-Southern has decided to take advantage of its region and its size. The lively young English faculty are experts in the ...”

“... not one novel but two. The first is Hystopia, which was published by Faber and blurbed by Richard Ford and is being reviewed right here in front of your very eyes. The second is also called ‘Hystopia’, but this one, as that shift in typography suggests, purports to be a posthumously discovered manuscript by Eugene Allen, a young Vietnam ...”

“... Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as he put it, ‘in and out of bughouses’. Even his triumphs seemed only to cause further distress. Though his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a critical success, sales were wretched, and he spent most of his working life in its shadow ...”

“... and the occasional nuclear missile silo, part of Frazier’s territory is already familiar as Richard Ford country, the featureless far horizon behind the plangent, spacy tales collected in Rock Springs. Frazier’s deadpan wit is often very nice. Here he speculates on the now-abandoned anti-ballistic missile system command centre at ...”

“... of writing from the US that the then editor Bill Buford labelled ‘dirty realism’, taking in Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Bobbi Ann Mason and so on), has always belonged to her and her alone. ‘For me,’ she has written, this ‘no man’s land, a deeply specific isolation drenched in family stories and secrets, is a huge advantage for a ...”

“... down. Not good.’ (No one knows how Trump saw this on television.)The Gastronomically Inclined Richard Ford: ‘I’m sure that I could not have dinner alone with Mr Trump in my favourite restaurant in Paris. He’d ruin it.’ (In contrast, if Ford ‘decided to tell President Obama … about ordering the cod at ...”