“... shoes – frowning as she walked without hesitation across the room and introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Reich and act accordingly!”’ He had captured the imagination of the ‘counterculture’. Norman Mailer, who dismissed psychoanalysts as ‘ball shrinkers’, promoted him in the Village Voice (‘intellectuals,’ he told Turner, ‘never had good orgasms’). For Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs he was the only analyst worth taking seriously ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pop Art collage, it consecrated absolute celebrity, the President and the King. The presidency, Norman Mailer observed during Nixon’s 1972 bid for re-election, is ‘a primitive office and inspires the tribes of America to pick up the modes and manners of their chief’. Two genres that thrived under the Nixon presidency were the law-and-order ...”

“... writer of prose, and after the Second World War, every male contender – William Styron, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Jones, Joseph Heller – had done some service and wanted to write literary masterpieces filled with the perfumes of combat.* It is only in more recent times that the task of writing novels about battle has fallen chiefly to ...”

“... among the worthies and elderly comedians. Booze started to turn up more regularly as the luxury. Norman Mailer asked for a stick of the best marijuana. Plomley: ‘This is illegal talk, Mr Mailer!’ Desert Island Discs’ famous roster became its most distinguishing quality – an invitation was an accolade and ...”

“... The chief enchantment of this book has not to do with the celebrated dust-ups between himself and Mailer, himself and Capote, himself and Tennessee Williams, or himself and William Buckley. Rather, we learn, not without preceding markers but in many ways for the first time, about Vidal’s family and about the Kennedy branch of it. We come to understand how ...”

“... heterosexual confidence also looms large in Hitchens’s encounters with the somewhat less dapper Norman Mailer. They fell out spectacularly after Hitchens asked Mailer during a TV show that also featured Germaine Greer whether ‘he’d ever wondered about his apparent obsession with sodomy and its male occasions (the ...”

“... walked around for days exhilarated by the change in the literary weather.’ He was encouraging of Norman Mailer without puffing him up, and he was also worried for him: ‘Mailer’s performance here’ – in Advertisements for Myself – ‘reminds me of the brilliant talker who impresses the hell out of you at a ...”

“... world – prostitutes – are least in a position to utilise this invaluable experience as art. Norman Mailer has said that there won’t be a really great woman writer – one, you understand, con cojones and everything – until the first call-girl tells her story. Though it’s reasonable to assume that, when she does, ...”

“... it is not out of the question that in making his speech for the defence he may sometimes have had Norman Mailer in mind. It is certainly a subject for Mailer, and might have made one for Dostoevsky. But it is also a treacherous subject. Its unknown quantities – which include an under-examined Northern social ...”

“... himself among the sons of the East Coast establishment, from William Burroughs of St Louis to Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn Jew. The Lampoon officers recognised the worker in the ‘cultural bumpkin’: he could put out the magazine single-handed while everyone else was horsing around and drinking, a vice Updike hardly ever indulged in to excess. (He ...”