Word: evening
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Those conflicting observations give Smiley his dimension and Smiley 's People its distinction. Yet aficionados must view this work with mixed feelings. It is melancholy to realize that a weakly plotted book contains the secret agent's last bow. It is reassuring to know that even now John le Carré, Circus Master, is in Switzerland pondering the next big act for the center ring. - Stefan Kanfer
...listened to similar verbal antics signalling supposedly great changes in Whitehall doctrine; signalling restraint, self-denial, always another reason for doing nothing. He had watched Whitehall's skirts go up, and come down again, her belts being tightened, loosened, tightened. He had been the witness, or victim-or even reluctant prophet-of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now, if he remembered Lacon's most recent meanderings correctly, of integration. Each new fashion had been hailed as a panacea: 'Now we shall vanquish, now the machine will work!' Each had gone...
...security? Perhaps Boyce and Lee actually were being used by the CIA to spread false evidence. If not, concludes Lindsey, then "the affair of the snowman and the spy who called himself Falcon was an episode that demonstrated amazing ineptitude on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency." Even the most casual readers of newspaper headlines will recognize the allegation as pure nonfiction. - Donald Morrison
Contrary to cliché, Hollywood does not manufacture dreams; it preserves them in strips of celluloid that promise eternal life. Hollywood embalms desire. Hollywood is a necropolis lined with deities made to appear more beautiful and menacing than they really are. Hollywood, In short, is a good read, even when encountered in Moviola, an overwrought, eulogistic novel about the film business. The book is a greenhorn-to-mogul saga with cameo performances by great stars of the distant and recent past. There is even a bit part for Thomas Alva Edison, without whose inventive genius...
Farber is more convincing, even when he sits Barrere down (after dinner with Fred Astaire, the Jimmy Stewarts, Claudette Colbert, the Gregory Pecks and the Henry Fondas) and tells him his life story. It is an epic feature that includes three wives, mistresses, ups, downs and flashbacks from movie history. Farber is present at the Creation. After his theater chain folds he becomes production assistant to Mack Sennett at D.W. Griffith's Biograph studios in New York. Sennett and Mabel Normand carry on their Keystone Kops love affair; Harold Lloyd simulates climbing the side of a building...