And last night, in the space usually reserved for the State of the Union address, he offered an economic speech, serving to shield his deliberate scanting of the outside world.

His scanting of that allows his narrative to suggest that Taylorism triggered a spanking new anxiety about a Faustian bargain that degrades workers while making them materially better off.

Nor had there been a scanting of gallant bravery in any one of the Dalrei who died that day, seventeen of them, by Adein where it runs into Llewenmere by Pendaran Wood.

Without scanting the importance of political satire - and without discounting the pleasures of what the film historian Gerald Mast calls "the dialogue tradition" in film comedy - it is possible to grant that Agee had a point.

Following the opening of the Adams family papers in the 1950s, Page Smith published the first major biography to use these previously inaccessible primary sources; his biography won a 1962 Bancroft Prize but was criticized for its scanting of Adams' intellectual life and its diffuseness.