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“... ex-Communist Granville Hicks believed that he would have come out against both Stalin and Joe McCarthy, and implied that he would have approved of repentant Communists testifying before the McCarthy Commission. Such pointless but harmless guesswork is different from ...”

“... to be written; good writing in that kind calls for skill and intelligence. It happens that Mary McCarthy’s Cannibals and Missionaries has just been published over here.* Miss McCarthy is very skilful, has a passion for getting everything right, and a taste for serious talk on intractable problems. Her book is ...”

“... as distinct from his wildly chequered life and surprisingly genial personality, has appeared since Mary McCarthy’s New York Review essay on Naked Lunch in 1963. Negative reviews throughout his career consistently missed the point. Partisans continue to generate reams of ephemera about ‘language virus’ and other notions he gave apocalyptic weight ...”

“... 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 ...”