Alfred Hitchcock is having a midlife, make that a late-life, crisis. His latest movie, North by Northwest, is a smash hit and yet he is nagged by doubt. “But you’re 60 years old,” a reporter shouts out. “Shouldn’t you just quit while

Protecting our own kind, humanity, against monsters is an age-old theme in literature. It�s the story of Beowulf and of the Hannibal Lecter series. In the former, the monster Grendel was plainly not one of us. In novelist Thomas Harris� Lecter stories, and the lore surrounding serial killers real and imaginary, the challenge in slaying the monsters is that they walk among us in our semblance. ...

The Republicans became the party of fear in the aftermath of World War II when a pair of returning servicemen, Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, ran for national office and turned politics into a battlefield. Communism was the ominous drumbeat they sounded, along with worries of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. McCarthy was the more bumptious of the two and soon fell to his own excesses. Nixon b...