“... which goes back to Nero. It has exercised a certain type of Romantic sensibility from Sade to Mailer, and some bards of fascism or para-fascism from Marinetti to Céline. Said on car-bombs is not lyrical in their fashion, but I suppose it’s more in keeping with the times to ‘theorise’ than to enthuse. In the age of what one writer has called ...”

“... The night​ before the midterms, I reread The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer’s account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon. ‘Brood on that country who expresses our will,’ Mailer wrote:She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin ...”

“... encouraged by the stunningly successful debuts of some of Vonnegut’s contemporaries, notably Mailer with The Naked and the Dead, Jones with From Here to Eternity and Heller with Catch 22). After a conventionally modest beginning with the hardback-only Player Piano Vonnegut became a writer of original paperback fiction: a format which in those days ...”