Ideas and the Novel contains Mary McCarthy's Northcliffe Lectures, delivered at University College London last year. If one actually goes to hear such lectures one can savour the wit, the premeditated pauses, and the charm of the speaker. If one loses the chain of associations, it is almost always because one's own attention has wandered momentarily. To read rather than to listen to them is to lose the immediacy of the speaker's presence, but also to gain the time to ponder the force and plausibility of a particular argument. Ideas and the Novel—covering as it does a wide spectrum both of novels and historical periods—is far too compressed to make a satisfactory book. To have heard the lectures must have been provocative and entertaining; to read them is to be irritated and bewildered.

"He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it." T...