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“... to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the ...”

“... used to appear every night just before the television news, with Saddam passing underneath on a white horse. On certain matters Simpson reaches firm, though not unchallengeable opinions. He thinks Saddam decided to invade the whole of Kuwait on the spur of the moment, possibly as a result of a personal insult spat out by the Crown Prince of Kuwait at a ...”

“... Norman Tebbit, Conservative Party Chairman, was displeased by television coverage of the American attack on Libya. British public opinion had swung so decisively against the raid, he said, because of the pictures people had seen on their television sets. Not pictures of bombed-out military installations, which would have been all right, but pictures of dead and wounded civilians ...”

“... with the question of whether the historic free constitution of the Anglo-Saxons had survived the Norman Conquest and feudalism. Did the ancient constitution persist into the present, as Whig antiquaries contended, or was there a feudal discontinuity in the course of English history, as argued by royalists and Tories? The debate that had most purchase on ...”

“... my entire top shelf, or cupboard-top, of books: Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, Junkie, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Lolita, books which I had lovingly collected from jumble sales and Oxfam shops, and which I now had a strong sense were somehow ‘wrong’. We’d done ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ for O-level English, so that stayed. Nineteen ...”

“... my hair. You need it worse than I do.’ Thy need, or necessity or whatever, is greater than mine. Norman Mailer’s book about Gilmore is a work of genius in its range, depth and restraint. It has speed, which Gilmore had, and patience, which he had not. It has lucidity, even when dealing with legal entanglements. It has forbearance, even when witnessing ...”

“... of the Virgin Mary. At Jaen in 1430, for example, four people saw the Virgin as a tall lady in white: ‘From this lady issued so much brightness that she shone as the sun shines.’ At Sant Aniol, near Girona, she appeared as ‘a beautiful, elegant woman dressed in white’. At Pinos, near Lleida, in 1507, a man saw ...”

“... Moynihan announced in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. Herzog, in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that movement. It is a masterpiece, the first the movement has produced.’ Herzog not only had critics ...”

“... the captaincy, insisting that it should go to Worrell for the famous Australian tour of 1960-61. A white player serving as vice-captain under a black was at that time part of the education of West Indian society. Sir Frank Worrell, probably the greatest all-rounder of the Fifties, who possessed the kind of natural authority that used to be associated with the ...”

“... persons. The president was Dr – or, as he prefers, for he is proud of being a surgeon – Mr Norman Haire. Avies Platt Norman Haire, even to progressives, is an extraordinary, I might even say an incalculable being. He considered himself, and probably was, the only really qualified, practising sexologist in ...”

“... and young characters made it seem a product of a hypothetical GLC film unit. Small wonder that Norman Stone bemoaned ‘the overall feeling of disgust and decay’ conveyed by the film and complained that Kureishi was inciting a ‘sleazy, sick hedonism’. Audiences disagreed. Costing £600,000 to make, the film grossed $15,000,000 and earned the young ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a place in the pantheon, a penthouse view. Not Bret. He didn’t seem to care about any of that traditional jazz. Whether it was a frosty pose or reflected a genuine disposition, Ellis didn’t court establishment acceptance and ...”

“... simplicity itself as a disguise. What the wind blows away The wind blows back again is how Norman Nicholson ends a poem in his new collection, Sea to the West. The lines are perhaps low on witty morality, but their power is the greater for that: coming at the end of a description of weather over Black Combe (a recurrent point de repère of the ...”

“... the Crowd, and – an improbable-seeming name, perhaps, in this context – Menachem Begin’s White Nights. The self-excited, voyeuristic fervour of Norman Mailer’s reveries about crime and the nature of the criminal belong to another world entirely. Two final points. First: how foolish and dangerous it is, in ...”