“... is certainly embarrassing in its crudity and naivety, and it is one of those blemishes that leads Norman Mailer to call JFK ‘one of the worst great movies ever made’. The question I want to raise is whether the worst parts of JFK are separable from its greatness, or at least (since I’m not really sure it is a great movie), whether they are ...”

“... recognise. ‘It seemed to me,’ William Styron wrote, ‘an act of willed destruction.’ Even Norman Mailer thought it was ‘not even bold, but rash’. They never had anything to do with him again. He had cut their throats, so to speak. In his correspondence with people in Kansas, the most touching letters are to Alvin Dewey III, the son of the ...”

“... or in the times to which they bore witness. The same pendulum was on the move in the work of Norman Mailer, another diabolical dualist, another man of the Left whose sense of a stalking evil drew him to the right. Duality has done its bit to distract American socialism, and to instruct it. To a charge of complicity with the student protesters of the ...”

“... for the ferry across the Styx’ – but he was present at the notorious occasion in 1960 when Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. His name appeared on a guest list published in the newspapers, and Schwartz considered the possibility that the whole thing ‘may have been – probably was – a set-up’, part of an attempt by ...”

“... essay ‘The Intellectual and Jewish Fate’, published in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1957, Norman Podhoretz, the patron saint of neoconservative Zionists in the 1980s, said nothing at all about the Holocaust.Jewish organisations that became notorious for policing opinion about Zionism at first discouraged the memorialisation of Europe’s Jewish ...”

“... and dangerous became more and more part of her legend. ‘Giving a camera to Diane,’ Norman Mailer said, ‘is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.’ In 1962, she began to use a Rolleiflex instead of a Nikon. The advantage wasn’t merely that the Rollei could register more detail but that it could be held at waist ...”

“... redouble their efforts and intake of the white man’s sperm.’ Having praised Richard Wright and Norman Mailer, Cleaver went on to say: ‘I, for one, do not think homosexuality is the latest advance over heterosexuality on the scale of human evolution. Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become the head of General ...”

“... pretension of the Terry Johnson-Nicholas Roeg film Insignificance; at the other, it inspired Norman Mailer’s ‘novel biography’ of a ‘possible’ Marilyn, which proved a triumph of intuitive speculation. Mailer leaned heavily on the first edition of Fred Lawrence Guiles’s book, suggesting that one day a ...”

“... it as their task to rip the cover off national self-deceit. Looking back, her friend the writer Norman Rosten defined the 1950s as a time of ‘cowardice on a national scale’, when ‘strong citizens fell before the rhetoric of pygmies.’ She had her own brush with McCarthyism when Arthur Miller was summoned by HUAC and she spoke out on his ...”

“... perversity is overcome in the interests of civilisation; and in the work of Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, sexual desire reappeared as a potentially revolutionary force. Dollimore challenges both the underlying heterosexual biases of these sexual liberators, and the romanticising of an innately revolutionary gay sensibility, as in ...”

“... pieces, preferably with a direct link to violent crime, for a tabloid newspaper. His name is Norman Miller, but its similarity to Norman Mailer’s no longer gives him the pleasure it did when his pretensions, if not his values, were higher (an encounter with Mailer at the time ...”

“... of going to a Shakin’ Stevens concert in Birmingham. The second part is mostly reviews: of Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex, The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger, a book about the ‘Catholic sensibility’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blake Morrison’s The Movement, Martin Amis’s Success, Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the ...”

“... McCarthy-Arendt correspondence quickly developed, via lunches, ‘parrot talk about politics, sex, Norman Mailer’, an exchange of gifts (a silk scarf, a Pottery Barn casserole), into an extraordinarily rich friendship. When friends and foes alike turned on Arendt’s Eichmann book, it was McCarthy who leaped in to defend her: ‘I freely confess that ...”

“... not to want to. The Summary for Policymakers is a strange document, one which bears out a comment Norman Mailer once made to the effect that ‘form is the record of a war.’ In this case, the war is that between science and the politics of global warming, which is powerfully present in every line of the SPM, mainly in the form of its total absence. The ...”

“... he pushed her out of a moving car? – seemed almost unassimilable with the figure. You expect Norman Mailer to stab someone. You don’t expect the author of ‘This Is Water’ to stalk someone for years. He often made light of his obsessions in interviews: Alanis Morissette. Melanie Griffith. Margaret Thatcher, leaning forward to cover his ...”