His style is at once engagingly supple and unabashedly old-fashioned.

Over the last few years Mr. Ward has built a good-size following by holding back: his voice is a well-worn croak; his folky arrangements are unabashedly old-fashioned; his songs usually build toward nothing stronger than a shrug.

An unabashedly old-fashioned masculine type, the kind of character Mr. Quaid has been slow-cooking to perfection over the years and which, on American screens at least, has lately gone missing.

Less a novel (or, at 160 pages, a novella) than an unabashedly old-fashioned tale, "The Zigzag Way" is filled with ghosts and chance meetings, with eerie atmospherics and people trying to fit in where they don't quite belong.

Another offering from the Modern Library Chronicles is The Renaissance: A Short History, by Paul Johnson ($9.95), an unabashedly old-fashioned overview of Renaissance art and literature.

Both collections are unabashedly old-fashioned, while at the same time avoiding the smarmy pit of nostalgia.

The book is unabashedly old-fashioned.

They helped popularize the unabashedly old-fashioned genre known as alt-country, which worships age, not youth.

"Love, Work, Children" is an unabashedly old-fashioned novel of manners set in the same New York neighborhood as Mendelson's 2003 fiction debut, "Morningside Heights," and it shares that book's preoccupation with marriage, money and morals.

The same may be said of Paul Johnson's unabashedly old-fashioned account of the Renaissance.