“... straight writer to have a gay hero is still highly unusual. A fascinating essay in this context is Norman Mailer’s ‘The Homosexual as Villain’, commissioned by the gay magazine ONE in the 1950s. He’s pretty unsparing of his own past novelistic practice, saying that when he thought homosexuality was evil it made sense to dole it out to negative ...”

“... of American empire. This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. ‘The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to ...”

“... to write about a river and a woman, about the destiny of water and my sense of growing older. The page fills easily and quickly.’ Unfortunately, the gods set traps in solved problems, and they are suspicious of ease and speed. The sequence called ‘Anna Liffey’ is lengthy, and excerpting may be unfair: I came here in cold winter. I had no children. No ...”

“... in the 50-year history of the NHS, there hasn’t been another like it. William Beveridge’s 300-page report, Social Insurance and Allied Service, was submitted in November 1942. By the end of 1944, it had sold over 200,000 copies. It had been commissioned with postwar reconstruction in mind and was to lead to one of this country’s most underplayed ...”

“... and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian Kemp’s Tippett: The Composer and His Music, was sketchy on biographical ...”

“... and British governments have been ‘overthrown by seaborne invasion at least nine times since the Norman Conquest, in 1139, 1153, 1326, 1399, 1460, 1470, 1471, 1485 and 1688’. There were also plenty of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London ...”

“... on a Frankensteinian life of its own, and its creator found himself a boldface gossip column item. Norman Mailer might crackle before the TV cameras, Gore Vidal might manicure his aperçus and Truman Capote flick his malice, but Roth had no desire to hop on the carousel horse.Post-Portnoy, he mastered the art of emerging and receding from the media ...”

“... the late Valerie Eliot and on many archives (especially those of Faber). Occasionally, there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print annotation, but the notes themselves contain a treasury of Eliotiana. There are a few very minor mistakes, but in scope, detail and quality of annotation this edition is ...”

“... d’Arc was staged in Paris in 1925, with Le Gallienne again in the lead role, a set design by Norman Bel Geddes, and luminaries such as Arthur Rubenstein, Cole Porter, Ivor Novello, Dorothy Parker and Mrs Vincent Astor in attendance on opening night. It closed after a few snaggle-toothed performances. In Jacob Slovak (1923), the one de Acosta play to have ...”

“... more than denote the genre of the poem. It says that we are looking at the form of a life on the page: In my childhood trees were green And there was plenty to be seen. Come back early or never come. My father made the walls resound, He wore his collar the wrong way round. Come back early or never come. My mother wore a yellow ...”

“... a year ago. And I also urged Bird to send it to him. But the Vietnam drama takes up less than a page of his biography, and mentions Berlin’s real positions not at all. We are given, instead, a familiar impressionist sketch of an honest and troubled man – the word ‘detachment’ makes its appearance – unable to ally himself with the extremists of ...”

“... they have projected onto them what they would like to be but are not’. Algren was hardly alone; Norman Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’ would be published within a year of Wild Side. Still, the clichéd racial promise of salvation is shattered with horrible force. At the climax of the book the legless man on a roller-skate board – his rolling down the ...”

“... asked. ‘Well, he wrote enough.’ The great bulk of Mitchell’s work can be found in the 718-page omnibus volume, Up in the Old Hotel, published by Pantheon four years before Mitchell’s death, and it is enough. The first thing to stress about Mitchell as a writer is that it is no work to read him; his pieces are funny, full of surprise and intensely ...”

“... going to be a delay. I hadn’t looked at the book in front of me in more than thirty years – Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his two convention pieces from 1968 – and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on a sentence: ‘The reporter was a literary man – symbol had the power to push him into actions more heroic than ...”