“... 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 ...”

“... to write about the case. There is no shock-value remaining in stories of media vampirism: Norman Mailer used it up with The Executioner’s Song. Neither is there much mileage left in the documentary/fiction form he realised so brilliantly, for Mailer’s book is a lesson in the limits of our ability to tell ...”

“... 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 an understanding of female sexuality has taken over twenty years, or to know how very badly Norman Mailer behaved in New York Town Hall in 1972. Alternatively, the writer can take herself as the subject of the collection, and its various parts as the items of a life history. There are various ways of doing this. A young and naive writer will prune ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In Cold Blood, which was the inspiration for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) and Don DeLillo (Libra). In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her much anthologised ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but disconcerting. They’re like Nabokov tearing strips off Edmund Wilson over Eugene Onegin, or Norman Mailer beating up on his rivals for Heavyweight Champion of the Novel. And they tread all over the melancholy Sondheim shares with Hart. Sondheim once wrote a play of his own, Getting Away with Murder (that old theme), but it flopped. Here, in his ...”

“... function of indexes since the great days of white male writers, when William F. Buckley sent Norman Mailer a copy of his book The Unmaking of a Mayor and wrote ‘Hi!’ in the index next to Mailer’s name. Job’s comforters will want to be the first to tell you that the entry for ‘clocks and sundials’ in ...”