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“... nurse’s uniform, and wore antique necklaces and jade earrings on the hospital ward. According to Mary McCarthy, her stories always contained the sentence: ‘And there I was in the fullest of full evening dress.’ She gravitated towards people who stood out, like Audrey in her ‘shivering apricot frock’ in Quicksand (the character was based on the ...”

“... are without an interval’. This highhandedness was consistently deplored by several critics – Mary McCarthy in particular. The biographers, too, deplore it, though Callow also stresses the boringly reverential nature of rival productions. Nor were subsequent film adaptions more restrained. ‘There is hardly an unspectacular shot in Welles’s ...”

“... surprised to find in her posthumously published correspondence that in letters to her dear friend Mary McCarthy – known to her New York associates as ‘our leading bitch intellectual’ – she gives the impression that she shares McCarthy’s resentful and dismissive view of Podhoretz. ...”

“... to philosopher-doyenne Hannah Arendt’s New Year’s Eve party, attends a small dinner party at Mary McCarthy’s ‘meticulously furnished apartment’, and receives his ‘first summons’ to a posh Park Avenue salon stocked with ‘titled European ladies’ and similar barracuda. He doesn’t divulge any gossip or glean any Tom Wolfe-ish ...”

“... uncertainties.’When she discovered that Lowell was with Blackwood, she wrote to her friend Mary McCarthy: ‘I knew Cal [Lowell] had a girl and had been distressed for some time, but it was just this afternoon that I knew it was Caroline. I felt such relief and burst out laughing! … I cannot take her seriously for Cal. There is a comic element ...”

“... amount about William Byrd, partly thanks to quite recent archival rediscoveries, and Kerry McCarthy splendidly and concisely presents it all in this intelligent and affectionate biography. Alas, the one thing we don’t have is a contemporary portrait, not even anything as clumsy as the universally recognisable dome-headed icon of Shakespeare: the ...”

“... be so. Unusual minds do not always admit others, and some Pale Fires are not lucky enough to have Mary McCarthy as their first reader. Sometimes he is boring and overdazzled at the same time. Try reading Ada or Ardor with a headache and see if you don’t feel that you’re listening to the heartbeat of an overdosed magician. Try embarking on Bend ...”

“... time she will be merry, or sad suddenly upon no manifest cause.’ Here is the washerwoman-poet Mary Collier in the 1730s complaining about her sleep being broken by ‘froward Children’ who ‘cry and rave’. Here is Hester Thrale in 1777, trying to write at home in London but finding that ‘the Crying of a young Child … will soon drive out of a ...”

“... and finally Presidents Johnson and Nixon, both of whom were severely damaged, as was Senator Joe McCarthy, by the dramatisations on TV of such horror shows as Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and the Army-McCarthy hearings. Truman gets treated very scantily in the book for the reason, I suppose, that he proved, as did ...”

“... to prove it. The novelists and poets in these pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and ...”

“... to explosive behaviour, even when summoned to Washington to account for his radical past by Joe McCarthy, and taunted and grilled by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, in March 1953. The transcripts of those sessions, declassified in 2003, present a battle of wits, as Hughes ducks or deflects or refutes Cohn’s ...”

“... 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 ...”