Stained Glass is more of a novel than a thriller, and it differs from the idols of its marketplace in some interesting ways. The first is in its sense of character. The second is in the correlative of its title. The third and most important difference is political. Stained Glass is squarely centered on a political issue, not a fantasy. It is worth reading and remembering because it is informed by strategy, and consists, as a novel, in the working out of a political possibility…. The subject is the un...

[Detective fiction has come so far as] to embrace political philosophy in the person of William F. Buckley Jr., that essayist, columnist, hymnodist of all things conservative, in his second thriller, Stained Glass. The first, Saving the Queen, was replete with ambiguity, irony, suspense—all those qualities we associate with Ambler, Greene, le Carre and company—and yet it put forward by example an argument about loyalty and guilt which was, to this reviewer, thoroughly convincing. Now Buckley a...

William F. Buckley Jr. is almost alone in using genuine political mischief as a source of wit in the spy novel. He raises the sort of questions that only the most naïve and the most sophisticated political observers would dare to ask. He says, "What if—" and then proposes something that is as attractive as it is preposterous, something so nearly commonsensical that it throws the entire Western world into pandemonium. He did this in "Stained Glass," his last spy nove...

[Stained Glass,] an elegant and engaging tale of East-West skulduggery in postwar Germany, genially observes all the conventions of the first-rate spy story and at the same time conducts a disturbing lesson in the unsavory realities of international politics. Given to outlandish fantasies …, the author here advances a startling proposition: What if the Western Powers, the United States in particular, had resisted Soviet tyranny in East Germany during the scramble for influence in Europe that followed...

If one word can be used to describe William Buckley's new suspense novel [Stained Glass] it is "absorbing" rather than "exciting" but since the book's discriminating readership is almost pre-selected by the erudite fame of the author this can be only high recommendation. The public has become conditioned, perhaps unfortunately, to a manner of speed writing in spy stories, which helps impel the action, so although the question should be asked: Can a spy story be too ...

As an adventure novelist, William F. Buckley has done it again with Who's on First?. For journals of opinion, aristocratic politics tend to become a drag after a few decades. But they are just the thing in the boys' books Buckley has been writing. I like Blackford Oakes, his hero, partly because nobody I know has a name remotely reminiscent. I admired his exploits in Saving the Queen in which to preserve freedom and save NATO he was compelled, respectfully, to administer sexual solace to the Q...

Americanism, Catholicism, the Red Menace, the idiocy of the liberals—that is what "Stained Glass" is all about. It is a tract, in black and white, full of post hoc conclusions. One thing, though. The breezy, uninhibited mind of the author always comes through. Only Mr. Buckley could gleefully get in passing cracks about Adlai Stevenson, Alger Hiss, Charlie Chaplin, The New York Times editorial page. Only Mr. Buckley could pause to talk about "Parsifal" and Bach. Only Mr. B...

I now understand enough about reviewing spy novels not to reveal the plot of this elegant and witty book set on the eve of the Sputnik launch. But it is safe to say that Who's on First skillfully combines a drama of high politics with one of high technology. We learn something about ozone fuels and transistors. We visit the Gulag and the chambers of the Washington elite. We meet a semi-alcoholic Navy captain who reads Forever Amber, and a boisterous and obscene rocket scientist straight from the Texa...

[In Stained Glass] we have what can unblushingly be called a rattling good yarn, a firmly built and racy thriller, a perfect read for a wet English summer. More than that, though. Buckley doesn't shirk the job of taking his fiction where his history leads him. We get a clear picture of the politics of that republican gadfly, his attitudes to the Cold War, to communism, to NATO etc. Interesting stuff and well, not to say expensively, served in a high class fict-o-mix.