When William Safire left the Nixon White House to hold forth on the op-ed page of the New York Times, many readers reacted with disbelief, as if an intruder were defiling their liberal temple.

William Safire, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and language maven for the New York Times, whose penchant for the barbed and memorable phrase first manifested itself in speeches he wrote for ...

When George Orwell composed his essay "Politics and the English Language" in 1946, William Safire was only 16 years old and studying at the Bronx High School of Science, the last educational ...