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“... from other volumes of essays.) The only real glimpse one has of him here comes in the essay on Truman Capote: What continues in Capote, and continues in force, is the idea that life is style, and that shape and mood are what matter in and out of fiction. That is the famous lie on which aesthetics feeds the ...”

“... after meeting the American heiress Natalie Barney, the ‘impératrice des lesbiennes’ in Paris, Truman Capote still sounded starstruck. In the years just after the Second World War he went regularly to Barney’s weekly salon at 20 rue Jacob. Inside the house, a cross between ‘a chapel and a bordello’, with a domed stained-glass ceiling and a ...”

“... Elaine’s’. (The novel is set in 1969, so Yardley is to be imagined drinking with Tom Wolfe, or Truman Capote.) Dexter, a successful novelist who still works as a newspaperman and lives in the sticks, on an island in the Puget Sound, clearly detests Yardley, but Ward is no hero either. At times in Dexter’s fiction, a Ward-like manner – Dexter’s ...”

“... fame and death all meet. He began his career as a proponent of the non-fiction novel pioneered by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer; his first book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s killing ...”

“... us to an older England, from Burton to Kipling; ‘The Americans’, from Edgar Allan Poe to Truman Capote, a culture as far from us in space as is the older England in time; ‘My Contemporaries’, from Ivy Compton-Burnett to V.S. Naipaul, where the richest, funniest and saddest anecdotes are to be found; and a short fourth section, ‘Proust and ...”

“... it was to let the camera see something lovely or remarkable. So there are gorgeous pictures: Truman Capote dancing with Tuesday Weld at Dunne’s black and white ball; Warren Beatty, scrawny, bespectacled, hunched over a piano; Tony Curtis and Belden Katleman (a Las Vegas gentleman) at a wedding, looking like Corleones. There are also fearsome ...”

“... descriptions of the famous and the infamous – Timothy Leary, Warhol, Ginsberg, Charles Laughton, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Thom Gunn, the Reagans, Leslie Caron, Nehru – but it’s their performance that’s gossiped about, not their morals. When he describes people it’s as if he’s making notes for prospective characters in his novels (‘We had ...”

“... Norman’s management of that reflex is the dominant theme of his life.’ Like Emily Brontë and Truman Capote, he found life more natural in the anterooms of invention, and in his case such rooms were spread across continents. He could be depressive, and he relied on his writing powers to release him from that. At the centre of Evans’s biography is ...”

“... night of the small fists’. When not fending off Mailer, Vidal found himself trading insults with Truman Capote, a verbal slapfight which – like the one with Buckley – degenerated into an ugly legal tango. Apropos, the one occasion I met Vidal was in a television studio where the wife of the talkshow host David Susskind, attempting to launch a ...”

“... An inexpert but frequently impressive first novel, Soor Hearts is set in Shetland in the early years of this century. Magnus Doull, having sailed before the mast for ten years, returns to the fishing village from which he had fled under suspicion of having murdered Thomas Pole. Nearly everyone believes him guilty, since the two young men had been seen to quarrel ...”

“... white rabbit’, ‘a saint’, ‘a born loser’ (Gore Vidal), ‘a window-decorator type’ (Truman Capote): it really doesn’t matter how you describe Warhol. He could have been anyone, any intelligent watcher and waiter in Manhattan. And his cultural coup was astonishing. He annexed the production of art-works to the production of junk, and ...”

“... the most resonant names, even though quite a few are unfamous. The famous in their youth include Truman Capote in 1947, T-shirted and sultry among huge leaves and white wrought iron, and sweet Marilyn Monroe in 1960, her bound-up golden hair crested with a black-spotted veil, her patient gaze turned aside as she waits in what looks like a television ...”

“... with ‘razor-sharp’ ‘verbal photos’. ‘Hugh Hefner is “a nut” and “a pimp”, Truman Capote was a “snooty” whiner.’ In fact, Mr Richards doesn’t write at all. The author produced the book ‘with James Fox’, a journalist and friend of Richards’s, but we aren’t told how the collaboration worked. I’d guess that Keith ...”

“... was to the book. Bashir would perhaps say his only responsibility was to the film he was making. Truman Capote would say his only responsibility was to his art. What would Michael Finkel say? One has to imagine that, whatever he says, he is not familiar with The Journalist and the Murderer’s famous opening paragraph: ‘Every journalist who is not too ...”

“... her profile was lower than that of the other two main contemporary proponents of Southern Gothic, Truman Capote and Carson McCullers (both of whose work she detested), she was by no means publicity-shy. Her letters are lively and affectionate, though also at times, as one would expect, on the caustic side; they help Gooch to develop a convincing sense of ...”