Desmond MacCarthy, 1877-1952, was a British drama and literary critic. He was born on May 20, 1877 in Plymouth, Devon. He attended Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles intellectual society. He began his career as a journalist in 1903, but he moved to editorial work in 1907. Desmond's first experience as an editor was with New Quarterly and then Eye Witness (later renamed: New Witness). In 1913 he began writing a weekly column for the New Statesman as "the Affable Hawk." In 1920 he became the literary editor, then the drama critic. Desmond also contributed weekly articles to the London Sunday Times and broadcast literary talks for the BBC. He associated frequently with members of the Bloomsbury Group, and he had many literary friends. He was knighted in 1951, and he died on June 7, 1952.

Mary (Warre-Cornish) MacCarthy, 1882-1953, was a British writer. She was born in August 1882 in Lynton, Devon, the daughter of Francis Warre Warre-Cornish and his wife Blanche Ritchie. She married Desmond MacCarthy on August 29, 1906, and they had three children: Michael, Dermod, and Rachel. Mary, (or Molly as she was more often known) was a writer herself, publishing A Pier and a Band in 1918 and her memoir A Nineteenth-Century Childhood in 1924. Although neither Mary nor her husband were particularly well-known for their writings, they were both surrounded by the colorful personalities that defined turn-of-the-century English drama, art, literature, and society. Mary MacCarthy is often credited with coining the term "Bloomsbury" to refer to their group of literary friends, and she formed the Bloomsbury Memoir and Novel clubs. She herself was usually excluded from full participation in group activities because of her progressive hearing loss, but she continued to write, publishing two works of biography, Fighting Fitzgerald and Other Papers (1930) and Handicaps: Six Studies (1936), as well as a volume of miscellaneous sketches titled Festival, Etc. (1937). She died on December 28, 1953 and was buried with her husband at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.