“... where the Bible and The Joy of Cooking constituted the library. As a boy, I became acquainted with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Truman Capote as talk-show guests. The TV screen was their boxing-ring. Literally so, on occasion, for Mailer, who had studied his Hemingway. Vidal was the sophisticate ...”

“... it is at present.’ Few wrote about New York as a city close to extinction as dramatically as Norman Mailer. Appalled by the decay, violence, apathy and chaos of New York in the late 1960s, Mailer decided to run for mayor in 1969, the year he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Armies of the Night. Much of what ...”

“... life was other than a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total vacuum.’ Where Norman Mailer set out to bend the future with his telepathic powers and the Beats sought to hot-wire the American psyche (at the risk of frying their own circuits), Updike wrote as if he were doing fine draftsmanship under a cone of light, honouring creation ...”

“... good question for anyone to ask, especially someone who wrote 18 books and had five wives. Next to Norman Mailer, who did equally well on the spouse-mongering front, Bellow was a worker of slow, monkish application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book. John Updike, who had a modest two wives and wrote 63 ...”

“... well-written and compelling. It is in some ways more dignified than Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song because it does not fancy itself a ‘novel’. America has an appetite for murders and murderers which surpasses that of every other Western nation, and it even contrives on occasion to make heroes out of this material. ...”

“... character.’ Not long after their wedding, the young couple crossed paths in Paris with Norman Mailer, a classmate of Goodman’s at Harvard. Writing about the encounter two decades later, Mailer remembered Goodman as a ‘tall powerful handsome dark-haired young man with a profound air of defeated ...”

“... constant. Praxiteles would have knelt in homage to his countrywoman the Duchess of Kent.’ Norman Mailer’s Of Women and their Elegance focuses on sex appeal as it was defined in the American fifties, largely by the Hollywood queen of that era: Marilyn Monroe. Mailer’s long-standing fascination with Monroe ...”

“... a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh). One is a piece of vivid journalism recognisably in the tradition of Norman Mailer and other modern American writers. All these books are from literary stables. Michael Arlen’s first appeared in the New Yorker, and comes to the British reader via two very respected publishing houses (Fabers, incidentally, are apparently ...”

“... or European support for Mrs Thatcher’s tardy stand. It has nothing to do with Harold Pinter or Norman Mailer or any of Rushdie’s most fervent readers. It has not much to do with Mr Rushdie, although he might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. For the reality is this: that the man who just ten years ago shook the Middle East, whose pan-Islamic ...”

“... mainly he’s counting on the multitudes who’ve always loved his family to come out for him. Norman Mailer thought that the Kennedys ‘seemed magical because they were a little better than they should have been, and so gave promise of making America a little better than it ought to be’. But they weren’t, and they ...”

“... intelligent with very sexy legs’. From that out-of-the-body vantage-point he shares with God and Norman Mailer, Isherwood looks down on himself and his friend:Yes, my dears, each of you will find the person you came here to look for – the ideal companion to whom you can reveal yourself totally and yet be loved for what you are, not what you pretend to ...”

“... on Donahue who wanted to know what had happened to make her this way, Dworkin noted bitterly that Norman Mailer – at nineteen she had called him ‘America’s most talented novelist’ – was never asked this sort of question, despite his colourful life. (Is ‘colourful’ the right way to describe stabbing your wife at the launch of your own ...”

“... time, with a cast of thousands, that stood no chance of ever being completed. (Winogrand admired Norman Mailer, rivalled him in scope, energy, ambition – and in a disdain for any internal system of brakes. As it happens, he photographed Mailer at his fiftieth birthday party in 1973, on the receiving end of a ...”

“... it. Among the thousands were three Second World War veterans – Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer – who proposed to start a weekly newspaper that would provide an alternative to the established papers and magazines whose euphemistic prose had begun to feel Orwellian. In the autumn of 1955, they did just that.The Village Voice went to ...”

“... and their parties. Wilson’s disagreement with Nabokov, Lillian’s fight with Mary, and Norman’s fights with everybody, were the Boy’s Own stories of my youth. I was 29 when my first book was discussed in the New York Review and before I even read the piece I felt victorious, because the issue opened with an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick. The ...”