With John le Carré for instance, whose merely "competent novels of espionage" suggest he has never heard of James Joyce; or with William Golding, to whose Rites of Passage Burgess lost out for the Booker prize in 1980 and whose "banal" next novel, The Paper Men, is judged to disprove his publisher's claims for his greatness.
With 300 seats, it's three times the size of the original Landmarc in TriBeCa, whose menu and competent cooking it replicates but whose warmth it largely lacks.
With 300 seats, the Landmarc in the Time Warner Center is three times the size of the original Landmarc in TriBeCa, whose menu and competent cooking it replicates.
There are espionage writers who use the genre to explore the complexities of geopolitics, but Robert Ludlum, on whose novel this competent, enjoyable picture is based, was not one of them.
But if Raphelson is "a self-portrait to some extent," Mr. Baitz said, so too is the play's art dealer, Fabricant, whose "not particularly competent attempt at self-promotion reminds me of a failing version of myself".
By Morley Callaghan The New Yorker, September 27 , 1930P. 24 Young priest in parish has greatest respect for a Mrs. Gibbons, a well-groomed, dignified and competent woman whose donations were frequent and generous.
Accusations of child rape ensnare so many individuals and besmirch the reputations of so many institutions, it is hard to find a competent investigator whose integrity the paranoid – or perhaps not-so paranoid – cannot question.
Before I use an example from my own work, I want to mention that I am the only writer whose work I am competent to discuss; it would be presumptuous of me to analyze or assign purpose to other writers.
Jonathan Wright This is a "celebration" of the life of Sid Vicious, though his life hardly seems worth celebrating: a barely competent musician whose solo album, Sid Sings, is one of the worst ever made, who died while on trial for the murder of girlfriend Nancy Spungen.
His actions became a crusade in which he argued that society was more than willing to starve patients to death quietly or step on the morphine until they expired, but made no accommodation for fully competent people whose medical problems were so acute that they no longer wanted to live.
