“... of the orchestra, where has she put them? She has left them in a closet, or given them away to Norman Mailer, probably thinking they are too time-consuming to learn, too noisy, and not ...”

“... that American authors are particularly good at; he has written about the enmity of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, and now cites Berryman’s unease at Lowell’s pre-eminence (‘Who’s number one? Who’s number one?’). But how does this relate to The Information? Richard writes Joycean novels on a scale of difficulty that would make even Gilbert ...”

“... Shima’s House of All Nations. Reliable newspapermen had kept the score.’ Maybe so, although Norman Mailer said that Hecht was ‘never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose’. In her new biography, Adina Hoffman claims he was ‘as voracious for words as he was for girls – which was saying a very great ...”

“... women and salacious cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked ...”

“... cultural occasion at the White House. He also played his part, recorded for admiring posterity by Norman Mailer, in the March on Washington, and was active in other anti-war demonstrations. He exerted himself for Eugene McCarthy in his presidential campaign, and enjoyed it without expecting to have much effect on the result. His poems are strongly ...”

“... tones of the progressive tradition extending from Mark Twain and William Dean Howells through Norman Mailer, Murray Kempton and beyond, you are mistaken. Mencken also wrote this: The educated Negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a Negro. His brain is not fitted for the higher forms of ...”

“... about, Alvarez puts one in mind not so much of a reckless slugger and controversialist like Norman Mailer, as of a more genteel tradition of eccentric but robust writing; of a writer like A.J. Liebling, say, a man of legendary appetites, who found in boxing, as in eating and friendship, a source of pleasure, not merely an excuse for braggadocio and ...”

“... nothing succeeds, is also in a rather peculiar sense its own subject-matter. Back in 1967, when Norman Podhoretz wrote a book called Making it, it was said to be the then remaining object of prurient embarrassment, sex having ceased to be ‘what D.H. Lawrence once called it, “the dirty little secret” ’. Podhoretz decided to do for success what ...”

“... the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbit. It turns out that none of the punk parasites much liked the sounds or the bands who produced them. They were career anarchists, varnishing their leather armour while they waited for an offer from the Daily Mail. Essentially, NME ‘new ...”

“... my entire top shelf, or cupboard-top, of books: Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, Junkie, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Lolita, books which I had lovingly collected from jumble sales and Oxfam shops, and which I now had a strong sense were somehow ‘wrong’. We’d done ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ for O-level English, so that ...”

“... on a Frankensteinian life of its own, and its creator found himself a boldface gossip column item. 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 ...”

“... are formed under dirt.’ The rich matron of today attests to this truth with her facial mudpack. Norman Mailer claims that there is not a single smell in Hemingway. The Anglo-Saxon cultural persecution of stink has had a sadly impoverishing effect on creative literature, while the French licence of private odour led, not just to the best perfume ...”

“... Hollywood, commissars, property-developers and German road movies? This is a little like watching Norman Mailer define any residual meaning out of totalitarianism by cataloguing his personal dislikes. The moral vision nevertheless has force and integrity. And the film does turn the trick of showing Hitler’s Germany as a metaphor of our times. If Paris ...”

“... piece of prose is all that his spleen about the decay of English brings him to then let us have Norman Mailer any day. The other line of defence for linguistic conservatism – that English is now ‘codified’ and that there are advantages in respecting the codification – is more interesting. There are various arguments one can think of that might ...”

“... potential challengers – and without a trace of that competitive territorial urge that has driven Norman Mailer to his occasional bullying evaluations of ‘the talent in the room’. Discussing Bellow’s two most recent novels, Updike radiates a calm assurance; his tone is deferential but unsparing, and he shores up his objections with examples that ...”