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“... but is saved in time by Felix Holt. On the other side of the ledger, Maggie Tulliver is unselfish, Mary Garth is unselfish, the Dissenting minister Rufus Lyon is a pillar of unselfishness, Dorothea Brooke is headstrong yet capable of self-sacrifice. The limitations of this urgent central idea may explain why George Eliot’s ‘good’ characters are so ...”

“... He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’: T.S. Eliot writing of Henry James in the Little Review of August 1918. I want to take exception, not to the truth of Eliot’s pronouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it. The young Eliot’s epigram summed up with cutting brevity a creed that for Modernists appeared beyond dispute ...”

“... When did the dominant literary form of Western society turn away from dealing with large issues? Mary McCarthy’s 1980 Northcliffe Lectures begin by asking such questions with verve and elegance. Perhaps, she thinks, it is all the fault of the old maestro Henry James. As a critic, and even more as a practitioner, he got the public used to the doctrine ...”

“... orderly account of sexual and matrimonial chaos. Diana Trilling outlived Lionel by many a book; Mary McCarthy enjoyed the same revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might ...”

“... Bloody Mary, the blurb suggests, has found her match in her biographer Carol Brightman. Not that this is a hatchet job: if Brightman is a woman in some sense after her subject’s own heart it’s not in the way Randall Jarrell was thinking of when he put Mary McCarthy in Pictures from an Institution, saying that people couldn’t mention her style ‘without using the vocabulary of a salesman of kitchen knives ...”

“... then he doesn’t seem to have reflected on what he was doing. One of the surprising things in Mary McCarthy, Carol Gelderman’s new biography, is just how adventitious and chancey the lifelong engagée’s entrance into politics was. At a New York publisher’s party in November 1936, James Farrell, author of Studs Lonigan, asked the 24-year-old ...”

“... by Proust, instead of a novel by Marcel, is a depressing thought. Such reflections are prompted by Mary McCarthy’s latest book. There was something challenging and stimulating, a bracing offer of American romance, about A Charmed Life, and Cast a Cold Eye, and The Group, and other novels and tales of hers. Even Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood had a zing ...”

“... won’t have to suffer for it physically at society’s hands. In her novel The Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy has a no-good college teacher who can’t be got rid of, in the earnestly liberal atmosphere of a campus, once he has cunningly spread the rumour – quite untrue – that he had been a member of the Communist Party. This bestows tenure, a job ...”

“... regarding ‘real life’ has been made by Edith Wharton’s most direct heir (in this matter), Mary McCarthy, Miss McCarthy’s brilliant essay ‘The Fact in Fiction’ – published some twenty years ago, though her argument is to some extent continued and amplified in her recent Ideas and the Novel – revived ...”

“... Who is hotter than Mary McCarthy? Smarter than Susan Sontag? Funnier than Harold Bloom? Well, if you take her word for it, it’s Camille Paglia, come to set the world straight on the burning issues of our time: tenured radicals, date rape, the aesthetic evolution of Madonna. The self-styled genius and warrior woman seized public attention with her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a sweeping, Strindbergian analysis of culture as the war of the sexes ...”

“... To have been lampooned once by Mary McCarthy might have been considered a misfortune, but to have been ridiculed by her three times must count as some sort of carelessness. In her ‘Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man’, she presented Jim Barnett, a likeable boy from a promising background who, in the devil’s decade of the Thirties, could nonetheless suit his own fancy: From the very first, Jim was an independent in politics, siding now with the Communists, now with the Lovestoneites, now with the Trotskyists, now with the group of middle-class liberals he had known at college who were trying to build a Farmer-Labour party of their own ...”

“... appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. She established friendships with Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and W.H. Auden, who went so far as to propose marriage (she declined). Arendt has never inspired universal admiration, however. ‘She seems to me to be inaccurate in argument and to make a parade of learned ...”

“... Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist heroine sans pareil, didn’t approve of heroines. Great Women – or ‘icons’, as Elaine Showalter prefers to call the three centuries’ worth of feminist ‘rule-breakers and path-blazers’ celebrated in her new book – get short shrift in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: I shall not lay any stress on the example of a few women who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution … Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Mme d’Eon etc ...”

“... with Stephen, which Stephen told me she had known nothing about (and I more than suspected that Mary McCarthy, who had invited Stephen and me to dinner, cancelled after having spoken to Natasha over the telephone, Mary McCarthy referring to me and surprising Natasha that Stephen was not alone, upsetting her very ...”

“... of the world, how should we manage with one only?’ And when Woolf’s imaginary young writer Mary Carmichael learns the ‘first great lesson’, it is this: ‘she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman’ – the fatality, it turns out, is a matter of too much consciousness rather than of too much gender – ‘so that ...”