“... 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 ...”

“... I wrote, or you wrote, is ever going to be the same as what she wrote and he wrote, unless, as Truman Capote said, what you’re dealing with isn’t writing, but typing. So I’ve got cancer. I’m writing.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir ...”

“... writers as different (different from each other as well as different from him) as Muriel Spark or Truman Capote in part because in each case their work demonstrates that, where formal inventiveness is concerned, playfulness doesn’t merely issue in comedy. Still, it may be his fate to be celebrated as a contributor to the sub-genre now known as the ...”

“... that she enshrines her observations in a genre which has been turned to sensational advantage by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer? As a specimen of the genre it is superb, but it has to be said that it is an unsatisfactory, even a morally dubious genre. It is a genre in which Dame Rebecca West had earlier made a faultless showing with her account of the ...”

“... but also in a few books, such as the biographies of Norman Mailer by Peter Manso (1985) and Truman Capote by George Plimpton (1997). Plimpton had previously been involved in what may have been the earliest significant biography of this kind, Edie: An American Biography ‘by Jean Stein edited with George Plimpton’, published in 1982. The ...”

“... of 10 April 2007 I was on a plane over the Atlantic watching Infamous, one of the films about Truman Capote. It contains a scene where Truman and his frightful swans are discussing the Clutter family murder case. ‘Weren’t you scared going into their cells?’ asks Babe Paley (played by Sigourney ...”

“... leapt to the defence of culture as they knew it were Donald Hall, Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has ...”

“... of pornography for the masses and the scandalous success of Oh! Calcutta! His spat with Truman Capote over In Cold Blood. His years of demoralised inactivity. His third-act exile in Los Angeles, where he sunned with coked-out stars and their lizard-skinned agents, and yet was able to revive his reputation through a series of profiles for the ...”

“... the people he adored on the covers of the records – Terence Stamp, Shelagh Delaney, Pat Phoenix, Truman Capote, Candy Darling, Alain Delon, Viv Nicholson, Jean Marais, James Dean – and his songs are glittering with cribs from everything he ever loved, from A Taste of Honey, from Elizabeth Smart, from Karel Reisz’s films, everything, including ...”

“... at Paddington when he’d brought the Cathedrals Express in on time. 15 April. In his review of Truman Capote’s letters in the LRB Colm Tóibín lists Capote’s many dislikes, including Beyond the Fringe, which he thought ‘rather dreary’. I never could think of much to say to Kenneth Tynan or he to me but ...”

“... Meyer’s adventure The Seven Per Cent Solution. Many American and British novelists, from Truman Capote to Piers Paul Read, have taken on the non-fiction thriller. But the benefits of fictional devices to serious non-fiction, from the days of André Maurois’s romanticised version of Shelley to Norman Mailer’s pastiche of Marilyn Monroe, have ...”

“... Plimpton and Studs Terkel were two of its best-known exponents. In these books, the life of, say, Truman Capote, is told through the words of those who knew him: the author is editor and orchestrator. Lockhart’s Life of Scott is similar: much of the book is made up of letters from Scott and from his many correspondents, but he adds his own connecting ...”

“... from the Pope to Andy Warhol. Her sister Lee offered her support and then gossiped about her to Truman Capote and Cecil Beaton. (‘You don’t know what it is like being with Jackie,’ she told Beaton. ‘She can’t sleep at night and she can’t stop thinking about herself and never feeling anything but sorry for herself.’) When Ben Bradlee and ...”

“... the dance hall and the discotheque became increasingly valuable, a rare public space. According to Truman Capote, ‘disco is the best floor show in town. It’s very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix.’ Other clubs, though, were home ...”