“... force of that passage. She spoke about her ex-friends as if they were research that went wrong. Norman Mailer had been ‘nice’ in the early days but he got above himself and had too many big ideas. To her, he was just a boy rolling at her feet, and she disliked the idea that journalism could be about analysis and penetration, as well as the work of ...”

“... ends, sooner or later. The logic of not knowing why we are in Vietnam, to borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer, is that we shall scarcely know why we are anywhere, including home. Apocalypse Now Redux contains a whole miniature film within the film, twenty-five or so restored minutes, in which Willard’s group comes across an isolated French ...”

“... recalls Sixties youth rebellion. But there is an older New York tradition which is evoked. Like Norman Mailer, Wolfe has a nostalgic hankering for the old brawling Irish politics of 19th-century New York: the Irish are, as it happens, the only New York ethnic group who are not slandered by this novel. A hundred years ago, Irish politicians routinely ...”

“... constantly in television and radio biographies but also in a few books, such as the biographies of Norman Mailer by Peter Manso (1985) and Truman Capote by George Plimpton (1997). Plimpton had previously been involved in what may have been the earliest significant biography of this kind, Edie: An American Biography ‘by Jean Stein edited with George ...”

“... war were younger, apprentice meteors. Gore Vidal wrote a small, cool, personal book in Williwaw; Norman Mailer attempted in The Naked and the Dead to write the Big Novel about the war and ended up writing a kind of pastiche, a strange hybrid of modernist ambition and postmodernist decentredness – a fake, perhaps, but an interesting one. As Antony ...”

“... now wrote as ‘the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom’. (Less pleased were Norman Mailer, whose first wife divorced him after reading it; the pope, who banned it; and François Mauriac, who told a contributor to Les Temps modernes that ‘your employer’s vagina has no secrets from me.’)The Second Sex germinated in conversations ...”

“... the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set ...”

“... In the current issue of a magazine called The Face there is an article on Norman Mailer’s recent visit to this country. He was here, it seems, to promote Tough guys don’t dance, his latest novel: he did some ‘major’ TV interviews, a bit of radio, and – towards the end of his stint – he called a press conference in order to complain about the low quality of the reviews he had been getting ...”

“... PEN Congress held this January in New York may ironically have been the new timeliness which Norman Mailer’s outbursts bestowed on feminist consideration of masculinity, misogyny and writing. Mailer, president of PEN and chief organiser and fundraiser for the huge writers’ conference, shed his new persona as ...”

“... the footsteps of Mr Kurtz’. And not only Kurtz. After Conrad came Gide, Greene, Kapuściński, Mailer and Naipaul. Congo is endlessly fertile literary terrain. Seven years of war there – in a country the size of Western Europe with a population of almost seventy million – occupied fewer column inches in the Western press than seven weeks of war in the ...”

“... is as powerful and precise as anything O’Brien has written. Unlike Stephen Crane or Hemingway or Mailer (to whom he has palpable debts), he cannot accommodate war within a stable vision of the horrors of human life; there is no intense exploration of the test of courage we must all face. War for O’Brien is a morbid interruption, a bloody eccentricity. It ...”

“... a fucked-out burn-out who still has a seductive way with words. To borrow a word from Norman Mailer, Tynan was a sexologue – an ideologue about sex. He was an admirer of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, about whom he was writing a book-length study (never completed). With his once-voguish theories about armoured personalities and ...”

“... in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us’), Sontag keeps her cool in a raucous setting ...”

“... been a Dodgers fan) and wrote the liner notes for Cassius Clay’s I Am the Greatest. She met Norman Mailer, ‘whom she liked immensely’, and George Plimpton and James Baldwin, ‘a fine youth’; in 1968 Harry Belafonte invited her onto The Tonight Show along with Petula Clark and Dionne Warwick; he had been going to ask Robert Kennedy but ...”

“... a stop sign, coveting one another’s spouses like crazy. Updike would describe himself as a mini-Mailer, a stag among the herd of housewife does. For a time, the shifting combinations of partners produced quite a kaleidoscope. You couldn’t tell the players apart without a scorecard in this melange of matinée bed-hopping, impromptu interludes in parked ...”