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“... off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus detectable in the blood. You were ill, but you might not feel it ...”

“... attacks on Sanders from the Clintonite centre tend to either dismiss his ideas as ‘fantasies’ (Paul Krugman’s word) or evacuate the content of his politics and then tear him down in symbolic terms. Sanders’s callow millennial supporters are attracted to his purity and authenticity and are due for a wising up: his socialism would make him unelectable in ...”

“... Protestant intellectual circles in the 1930s; a teacher of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and an associate of Paul Tillich, he worked with as single a mind as theirs to draw the German people away from Hitler’s party. By the spring of 1940, when the lend-lease policy for Britain was first discussed by President Roosevelt and his advisers, Niebuhr was a firm supporter ...”

“... as a major writer, the poète maudit of black America. Like his mentor Faulkner (and later Cormac McCarthy), Himes appealed to a Parisian readership convinced of the essential savagery of American life. ‘What the great body of Americans most disliked’ about his work, Himes believed, ‘was the fact that I came too close to the truth.’ He wasn’t wrong ...”

“... about the same feat as the two drunken men. In the early 1950s, the demagogue-brawler Senator Joe McCarthy pronounced the doom of New Deal bureaucrats and lawmakers to requite ‘twenty years of treason’. Today, Congressman Adam Schiff of California – a quiet, lucid, methodical prosecutor in command of a flawless monotone – prophesies the destruction of ...”

“... the whole fucking thing drained into some unguessed world of caverns deep in the earth?’ Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Passenger. ‘Your plate-eyed krakens with their eighty-foot-long testicles. Then a big smell and then nothing. Whoops. Where’d everybody go?’As civil engineering, the 16-mile-long bore of the Super Sewer is an achievement to set beside ...”

“... appeared under the names of other writers: Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller), Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) and, later, Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Tom McCarthy.† In 2001 he published a sort of spy-thriller, a nouveau nouveau roman set in a ravaged postwar Berlin, but its title, La Reprise ...”

“... 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 Woolf, Murphy ...”

“... said, was ‘just a shade too young to have any legally recognisable political history’ when McCarthy was on the rampage. For the editors in New York who published his early work, he was ‘politically nearly a blank slate’, as Carol Polsgrove says in Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement.* Baldwin’s passionate involvement in the ...”

“... the novel needs another force, which emerges as the more determined and unconflicted figure of Paul Muniment, who is all outwardness, decisiveness and manliness, with politics that are focused, thought-out, physical, set against Robinson’s ambiguous sexual and social presence. But drama in the novel can only occur when Hyacinth’s bookishness, his soul ...”