Their story across both books has as many interpretations as characters: Stuart (pedestrian materialist or honest realist) is the victim (all's fair in love and war) of his best friend Oliver (pretentious parasite or inspired romantic) who steals (wins) his wife, Gillian, and goes to live with her in France.

ECONOMIST: New novels

In fact, the manic pace of the film precludes sustained meditation on Jamal's urban surroundings--the kind of revelations that arise from the languorous long takes of a realist filmmaker like Satyajit Ray or, to a lesser extent, Mira Nair (for example, in 1988's Salaam Bombay).

FORBES: Slumming It

And realist claims to the contrary, most readers do not want to be depressed or made to read acres of unattractive and banal verbiage.

WSJ: Alexander McCall Smith on Writing Dialogue | Word Craft

Given his apparent readiness here to dilute or do without realism, it is all the harder to see why he is so against non-realist interpretations of quantum theory.

ECONOMIST: But can we really explain it all? | The

Would he act like the cautious realist, who warned against sending U.S. Marines to Beirut in the early 1980s or the aggressive idealist who championed the Iraq war two decades later?

NPR: McCain's Foreign Policy Has Disparate Tones

The 1920-22 Irish revolt against the English, reimagined by the social realist Ken Loach as an awkwardly violent and sombre old poem made without the usual Irish flourishes of wildness or lyricism.

NEWYORKER: The Wind That Shakes the Barley