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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an Evening Standard contributor, who had taken me to the lunch, had just started going out with Norman Mailer.) But what I now think was probably genuine was the acknowledgment on the proprietor’s part that Wintour enjoyed ‘favoured nation status’ among Beaverbrook editors. Within certain limits – of which, no doubt, support for capital ...”

“... flashes just twice in this egregiously humane book – once for Louella Parsons, and once for Norman Mailer, who certainly owed his pound of flesh). And he despises the mindless experimentalism of the Sixties, the decade which ushered in an obsession with style and which showed Miller’s hard-edged, will-powered seriousness the door. With three ...”

“... scandalised, high-placed Papas, and without interruption now and then from sceptical oldies like Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, the tale of Edie might easily have drooled off into a dreary catalogue of hippy-scene excess. As it is, the book shrewdly keeps the straight world in its sights: a nicely judged mix of the titillating and the ...”

“... remain, in their terrifying way, beyond the grasp of almost all, from Jessica Mitford to Norman Mailer. That Kevles should be thought – as some have thought him – incapable of giving the background to this story, simply for having been serialised in the New Yorker is wilfully unimaginative. The mid-sections of In the Name of Eugenics turn on ...”