A collection of essays, like ["On the Contrary"], often serves to throw the personality of the writer into sharper relief than any one single work. It is like seeing him in a many-sided glass, catching an unexpected aspect of the profile, some peculiar structure of bone, some glint of unanticipated color in the hitherto familiar eye. Mary McCarthy's personality—her literary personality, I mean—has always interested and puzzled me: that voice sometimes a little too much de haut en bas, those brilliant flashes of insight, those descents into fractiousness, that delight in the topsy-turvy for its own sake, that basic, irrepressible common sense intruding at the precise moment when flights of contrariness seem hard to bear—it is difficult to make these things add up.

In these articles, written within the past fifteen years, Miss McCarthy is reminiscent, I think, of two English writers: in her harsh...