“... these days. A candidate who lacks basic qualifications (and hence could not present himself in a white toga) is a ‘nigrate’. The Maltese censors who finally allow Toomey his copy of Thomas Campion’s poems confuse the poet with the English martyr Edmund Campion. (Some autobiography there, I believe.) ‘Richardtionary’ is the polite homosexual term ...”

“... argued, shared a fundamental defect: ‘the notion that mere facts don’t matter’. He admired Norman Mailer, but had no time for his arguments on behalf of ‘the True-Life Novel’. What offended Hersey was not so much the naming of forms but that question of trust:In fiction, the writer’s voice matters; in reporting, the writer’s authority ...”

“... of ordinary kids from respectable homes in a ‘racially homogeneous’ – which is to say, white – neighbourhood. However, their toys included guns, fast cars and cocaine, and the murder of Marlene’s parents was an extreme form of their play. The parents had their own games, and must share the blame for the values inherited by the ...”

“... unclear but Berling seems – in a formula which recalls Lawrence Schiller’s involvement with Norman Mailer on The Executioner’s Song – to have been the man with the brass facts, willing to relinquish his load (Katz, typically, prefers the word ‘lode’) to a writer. But the top-billed author expresses a willingness to be blamed for the completed ...”

“... the reader through the public furores – the outcry over her 1966 pronouncement that ‘the white race is the cancer of human history,’ for example, used as a cudgel against her by conservative foes until their arms went numb – and developments in her personal life familiar from previous biographies, memoirs and profiles. While not stinting on ...”

“... personhood, their human individuality, to be foregrounded in these novels, they must be white and have a surname that is either Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Scandinavian or Celtic: Marlowe, Riordan, Sternwood, Ohls, Morgan, Conquest, Potter, Petersen, Haviland. A small number of characters with names that are ...”

“... themselves spotting the sources, mostly from recent progressive English buildings by Voysey or Norman Shaw (a London Scot), and some Scottish ones, by the Glaswegian J.J. Burnet. One influence behind the vaguely Scottish Baronial east elevation in Dalhousie Street is the little-known James MacLaren, a gifted Scottish architect who died young. Mackintosh ...”

“... women and salacious cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked ...”

“... feasts,/Haunting the granaries of words like breasts’, ‘Who would have thought it? At the White Gates/She let them do whatever they liked’), or the customary brew of voyeurism and Catholicism:The white towelling bathrobeungirdled, the hair still wet,first coldness of the underbreastlike a ciborium in the ...”

“... In 1911 a colonial wrangle brought Europe within sight of war: our world resounds with White House sabre-rattling, eagerly echoed by a clattering of knitting-needles from Downing Street. The book is put together on a plan adapted to its practical purpose. Its scrutiny of the second Moroccan crisis is firmly based on the diplomatic documents of ...”

“... very active role that many of the academics I knew had played in creating the bomb. At Harvard, Norman Ramsey had been involved in selecting the plane that delivered the bomb over Japan. He also signed off on the plutonium device that destroyed Nagasaki. Roy Glauber, an assistant professor when I first knew him, had been the youngest member of the technical ...”

“... texts, informed asides about ‘pastoral’, and a final jump – through the paper hoop of Norman Mailer’s ‘faction’ – into the company of Thomas Pynchon and Thomas Berger. One of his propositions is that ‘as far as the intellectuals are concerned, the prophecy that a literature of the West would emerge to liberate America from European and ...”

“... and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.’ Later still, as America stood on the verge of involvement in a foreign conflict, he warned against the ‘demagogues’ who would suppress dissent in order to push their war agenda: Any argument against the ...”

“... Holiday, ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’, is called out for appropriation in 1983:This is a white woman’s attempt – respectful, I believe – to speak through a Black woman’s voice. A risky undertaking, and it betrays the failures and clumsiness of such a position. The personae we adopt, the degree to which we use lives already ripped off and ...”

“... knees towards the noise of the crickets. He sees no more of the post as he passes than a blur of white among a throng of his rivals. There is no one to tell him whether or not he has got up to win.’ A few weeks later, Clementia breaks a leg while training and Augustine puts her down. Now baptised, Jean confesses that she became pregnant on the night of the ...”