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“... novelists and poets in these pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously ...”

“... mesmerised Alice B. Toklas admired her ‘dear Mercedes’s’ indestructible chic. According to Truman Capote, de Acosta was by far the best card to hold in the café society game known as International Daisy Chain, the goal of which was to ‘link people sexually, using as few beds as possible’. (With one lucky stroke you could ‘get to anyone from ...”

“... by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa Monica Mountains, then banking briefly over the Pacific, I glanced ...”

“... the myth of effortless achievement, making it clear that talent isn’t always its own best judge. Truman Capote’s childhood friend – Harper Lee and Capote grew up in the same small town in Alabama – may have come to know, at last, that success breeds its own vices, not least of which is the market’s ...”

“... promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the peerless Rita’ (the script was by Truman Capote). If this equally humourless young doctor cherishes such showbiz longings I am not to know, as throughout his grisly embroidery he utters no word. ‘Nearly done’ or ‘Just one stitch more!’ would have helped, even in Italian. But nothing ...”

“... which is wider among homosexuals than among heterosexuals.’ Asked in the same interview why Truman Capote loathed him, Bellow replied: ‘I don’t know enough about homosexual psychology to be able to explain it.’ The interview appeared in the May 1997 issue, three years before the publication of Ravelstein, and this arched eyebrow of animus ...”

“... interest. I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia – though I’m not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself. As usual I’m repelled by how ‘poetic’ it all is – their fierce quarrels and affections and all the fish, blood and bone of the ...”

“... Happy like Murderers reads more like a novel than a documentary. In this respect, it recalls Truman Capote’s ‘novel of fact’, In Cold Blood, which made compelling fiction out of the brutal and senseless murder of an apparently typical American family in rural Kansas, and created a new genre on the way. ‘Brutal’ and ‘senseless’ are, of ...”

“... was not alone in possessing glossy sex appeal. The young Gore Vidal boasted matinee-idol looks, Truman Capote beheld the camera like a debauched cherub on the back jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms, and Joan Didion, posed against a Corvette Stingray in a long stately dress and sandals, was a chic postcard for California dreamin’. But Sontag ...”

“... Norman Mailer might crackle before the TV cameras, Gore Vidal might manicure his aperçus and Truman Capote flick his malice, but Roth had no desire to hop on the carousel horse.Post-Portnoy, he mastered the art of emerging and receding from the media spotlight, surfacing when he had a squalling new novel to promote and granting a few key interviews ...”