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“... what might be anachronistically called its own symbolism. An anti-Modernist short story by Mary McCarthy tells of a creative-writing teacher in an American university who is informed happily by a pupil, as he finishes his fiction, ‘I’m just putting the symbols in’; there are moments in the two early tragedies (the arrows shot at the gods in ...”

“... state itself seemed fascistic, the shadow of Goebbels falling over the dark face of Joseph McCarthy, giving renewed vigour to Miller, and such as Miller, as they advocated resistance to the evil forces of their time. For Miller, The Crucible was not merely a searing objection to the McCarthy witch-hunt, but a potent ...”

“... could be ‘savage’. Samuel Bowles came to see her as ‘half angel, half demon’. His wife, Mary, found her manner ‘alarming’. Dickinson exploited this anxiety with glee and, when Bowles was out of town, took the opportunity to bombard Mary with menacing pleas for attention. In March 1862, shortly after Mrs Bowles ...”

“... which speak bitterly against the soft porn of their erotic doll-like state. In another room Paul McCarthy has directed Hollywood special effects technicians in his hometown of Los Angeles to create a nature morte of truly unsettling naturalism: That Girl (T.G. Awake) places three effigies of a model casually sitting on a plinth with her legs parted as if in ...”

“... hope that there will be no occasions of it. The first two occasions offered dismal precedents. Mary I’s consort, King Philip of Spain, was dangerously powerful in his own right, and only Mary’s barrenness saved England from becoming yet another component of the Habsburg Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided ...”

“... wanted to, and after that they went to Lourdes. My mother prayed at the grotto where the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette, and her prayers must have been answered, because two Enrights went out there, but three Enrights came back. In fact, my mother carried more than this, as yet undeclared, baby through Irish customs. My father told her to take the ...”

“... is magic which is used not to slay dragons or turn men into swine but to slide up the banister (as Mary Poppins does) or to light fires instantly in damp weather (as the Hogwarts wizards do). Harry is told that people who read without permission a book called Sonnets of a Sorcerer are cursed to speak in limericks for the rest of their lives, and there’s a ...”

“... of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and ...”

“... little magazines of the New York intellectuals, went to cocktail parties with Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy, and kept quiet about his identity and his politics. His parents, who were themselves estranged from Palestine (his father said Jerusalem reminded him of death), were relieved that their moody and contentious son was showing such ...”

“... he admitted in 1954. ‘That’s the way it was with the atomic bomb.’ Silvan Schweber and Mary Palevsky each worry about the gap between moral ideals and moral realities among the scientists who brought the Atomic Age into being and who lived with its postwar consequences. Both are moralists and both have personal reasons for their inquiries. Schweber ...”

“... with Pat Buchanan, whose acknowledged heroes are ‘General Franco, Cardinal Spellman and Joe McCarthy’. Mr Buchanan identifies with the Ayatollah on matters of blasphemy (as do the Vatican, the See of Canterbury and the Rabbinate). He attacked me for justifying Clinton’s reception of Rushdie; the ground for the attack being that Rushdie wasn’t an ...”

“... and amusing command of pastiche. The second investigation is called ‘About Miss Marple and St Mary Mead’ and is exactly that: we hear everything about this female sleuth and her village that can be derived from a careful sifting through the fairly numerous books that Agatha Christie wrote about her. The remaining pieces are all to some extent the same ...”

“... have anything to do with it. I wrote terrific letters to bigots like Cardinal Spellman and Joe McCarthy and only regret I probably did not send them (can’t remember and Baker don’t know). Gertrude Stein was surely Jewish too. She was a fine woman and a friend until she got the menopause, when she got patriotic about homosexuality. You could not be any ...”

“... society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness towards other intellectual women is legendary. The fact that Murphy seems to have been one of the kindliest people on earth no doubt only magnified her attractiveness. Though lacking scholarly training (like Virginia ...”

“... that Johnston hopes to alert to what he sees as something like the British equivalent of the McCarthy era. These case studies are followed by essays on authors once widely read outside the academy – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Burns, Lamb and Southey – in which Johnston asks what effect Pitt’s alarm had on the development of English ...”