Then came Tom and Viv, an unusually plausible play about literary people, a tragedy on both sides of the Eliots' marital estrangement, with a really clever dramatic discussion of degrees, and indeed definitions, of madness.
The late Nicholas Tomalin famously wrote that "the only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability".
It applies Hitchcock's editing style and attention to significant detail to an exquisite study of the tragic affair between a married literary intellectual (a plausible, sympathetic Jean Desailly) and a beautiful young airline hostess.
Less derisively, Nicholas Tomalin, a war correspondent for The Sunday Times of London who was killed in 1973, coined a more flattering job description: "The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability".
"RATLIKE cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability"—the qualities of a successful journalist, according to Nicholas Tomalin, one of the breed are not traditionally valued in think-tanks, the semi-academic institutions that come up with ideas for politicians.
In spite of some fine passages, his elaborate syntax and vigorously yet fitfully Americanised vocabulary finally seem more like a literary contrivance than a plausible human voice.
I ask Ford whether he gave Frank a literary background to make him a more plausible thinker.
The scenarios those films tend to explore are far more plausible (if rather mundane), and the writing generally shows a higher level of literary refinement.
In this case, a plausible reply is simply that fiction delivers no guidance to conceptual investigations: conceivability may well be a guide to possibility, but literary fantasy is by itself no evidence of conceivability (van Inwagen 1993: 229).
