“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 careers, Happy like ...”

“... and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The White Negro’ (1956): there is the same priapism, the same shameless display, the same gusto and verve, the same excruciating hipsterism, as ...”

“... said he hated New York for the greed and envy at Elaine’s, but he talked about Truman Capote and Norman Mailer as he did ten years ago – as rivals and enemies, coming back to them obsessively. Worst of all the New York crowd was Alfred Kazin – ‘Saul Bellow called him the conductor on the gravy train. Wherever they were passing out ...”

“... one knew what happened in the Twenties because no one living today was alive then. And the famous Norman Mailer, who had a hammock suspended under the roof of his New York apartment so that when, as he put it, ‘things got boring,’ the whole family could rush from the gallery on the second floor and jump into it. And finally Ronald Reagan himself, who ...”

“... unintentionally hilarious pages. Throughout, he refers to himself in the third person, rather as Norman Mailer and my small children do; though my kids, of course, do it only when they know they’ve been naughty and wish to neutralise rage with bogus charm. Gay Talese did all this dreary work – nearly a decade of listening to socially disorganised ...”

“... entertain many literary visitors. A Sunday supper they gave in 1957, for example, was attended by Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter and William Styron.’ The authors call people who want to know this kind of thing ‘literary travellers’ and they plead that such travellers have in the past been handicapped by the lack of a guidebook that covered ...”

“... the urban immigrant outpouring of Augie March) and to Barbary Shore and The Deer Park (the novels Norman Mailer wrote between his initial success with the more conventional war novel The Naked and the Dead and his emergence as a hipster prophet). Like Bellow and Mailer, Matthiessen eventually escaped the GI ...”

“... Like Norman Mailer in America, Kingsley Amis has made a career out of being nasty to women. Even in the days of low consciousness, Lucky Jim had liberals protesting at its treatment of the academic spinster Margaret, a woman whose sole offence was to be physically unattractive to young men. As the woman question has grown more noticeable, Amis’s gallery of male chauvinists has grown too, until in Stanley and the Women he has created a world in which only men appear to communicate with one another, and their favourite topic is their dislike of women ...”

“... five nights a week’ on TV. Their house was the place for parties, where guests included Norman Mailer and Spotted Eagle, a Native American chief who liked ‘radical-chic pussy’. Still, the Sixties didn’t do the Ayer-Wells marriage much good: Dee increasingly saw Freddie as an ‘uptight old fart’ and he thought her ‘a loudmouthed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”