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“... the life he led with his wife Elena and various other members of his family (and ex-family like Mary McCarthy), The Sixties is brimming over with accounts of visits with and from lots of important and interesting people: Penelope Gilliatt, Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James ...”

“... Joyce’. The latter is a manifesto of blasting and blessing whose villains include Mary McCarthy, for limiting her ‘medium’ (McLuhan’s word) to the ‘socially minded’ novel, the nouveaux romanciers for being ‘leaden’ and ‘humourless’, and the conventional short story for its devotion to the ‘mousetrap’ capture of ‘a ...”

“... writers (the great names trip off the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan ...”

“... an uncommon smoothness, but you never get, say, the sinuosity of Marilynne Robinson or the snap of Mary McCarthy. The stories are always filled out, where an elliptical strategy might have proved useful to a writer churning over material she’s used before, as in the case of Lydia Davis. I started to think of reading Munro’s sentences as something like ...”

“... comedy but for the depth of her feeling. He was rueful about his tussles with his co-panellists Mary McCarthy and Edna O’Brien when chairing the Booker in 1973. He had wanted The Dressmaker to win. J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur – incidentally, the only book by a man on the shortlist – got the award. When I was on the panel in 1990, I ...”

“... critical of Hardwick, whom he portrays as a less pretty, less talented, more status-obsessed Mary McCarthy, but sympathetic to the girlfriends and mistresses, whose encounters with Lowell make good material for easy sermonising. ‘His women,’ Meyers argues, ‘were drawn to his genius and madness … and became the sacrificial muses who inspired ...”

“... relationship, is often taken retroactively as a political parable – an attack on those in the McCarthy period who ‘named names’ – yet the heart of the drama lies in its depiction of the girl’s shocking misogyny and its dire consequences. (One of the teachers commits suicide.) In the early Eighties Hellman got embroiled in her own ugly mess when ...”

“... The editorial office was one small book-and-paper-suffocated room, with four of us in it: Karl, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Susannah Clapp and me. Even that staffing level sounds more lavish than it was, because Karl split his time with his other job as Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, about a ten-minute walk away. This ...”

“... Hannah Arendt. In Aberdeen in May 1974, Arendt had her picture taken along with her great friend Mary McCarthy less than a mile away from where I would have been sitting at that very moment in school. What on earth were those two doing in Scotland? Well, Arendt had been delivering the second part of the Gifford Lectures, which she would write up as her ...”

“... writer. She met new, often famous people. She had significant friendships with Violette Leduc, Mary McCarthy and the much younger feminist writer Monique Wittig. There were lecture trips that took her across the world, including back to Russia, and a long stay in Israel. She made frequent trips to England and the United States. In the 1960s, she began ...”

“... the taping, Vidal and I chatted about the then-hot slander suit involving Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. ‘When you get to a certain age,’ Vidal said almost wistfully, ‘a juicy lawsuit is sometimes the only thing that gets you up in the morning.’ We watched on the monitor as Asner repeatedly wondered aloud if the microphone attached to his ...”

“... Nor in this case was he unprophetic. The backlash against Kafka and Co, and against what Mary McCarthy called ‘the Proust-Joyce-Mann course’, has taken many forms, not all mindlessly Philistine, and Trilling would be disconcerted today to find Barbara Pym a new heroine of the campus course, and her novels the subject of doctorates. One ...”

“... No. No. No. No. No. No. No. O’Neill.’ In her witty prosecution of O’Neill as a dramatist, Mary McCarthy grouped him with the prolix early 20th-century American novelists James T. Farrell and Theodore Dreiser. ‘None of these men possessed the slightest ear for the word, the sentence, the speech, the paragraph,’ she wrote in Sights and ...”

“... surviving example of his handwriting (his signature). Within a year he had resurfaced, as Kerry McCarthy puts it in her new biography, in ‘one of the most prestigious musical positions in England, at the head of a list of professional singers hand-picked for the newly reorganised Canterbury Cathedral’.Tallis was remarkably resilient. He lived to be ...”

“... there in the living room of the suite with his legs crossed. Roy introduced him to me as ‘Mary’ and he replied, ‘Good evening,’ like the first time I’d met him. Mrs Rosenstiel, who has what I’d call an unusually good memory for apparel, possessed that keen sense of self-preservation that the more emotional ‘Dick’ Hannay lacked. ‘I ...”