“... physically nauseating. Schaeffer’s soldiers swear with a crudity that would satisfy ex-rifleman Norman Mailer. The third section of Buffalo Afternoon, and the most interesting, covers Pete’s 25 years after Vietnam and his inability to pick up the bits of his civilian life. He becomes a victim of post-combat psychosis. He is randomly violent; cannot ...”

“... aggressive hosts. About the only relief he gets is when Daphna the welder’s wife sticks it to Norman Mailer in a big way. It is a triumphant section of the novel – comic, scary, vibrant, seething with observation. This is just what Israel feels like to the eight-day visitor (whether Roth will get any thanks when the book is read over there is an ...”

“... you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a place in the pantheon, a penthouse view. Not Bret. He didn’t seem to care about any of that traditional jazz. Whether it was a frosty pose or reflected a genuine disposition, Ellis didn’t court establishment acceptance ...”

“... the Kennedys. Wills leads us into the world of Presidential power by the back door. Mimicking a Norman Mailer or a Frank Sinatra, he creates a world of booze and balls and broads and brawls which seems to be as seductive to him as it was to Joe Kennedy and his ambitious sons. The trashy novel in which Wills has – he might say ...”

“... French language to get away with iconoclastic pornography – that is, if you take it seriously. Norman Mailer gets away with it by clowning; so does Burroughs. Acker makes the mistake of taking herself seriously here, as though ‘ultimate outrage’ were not a commodity being peddled by her agents and publishers as assiduously as ‘towering ...”

“... Bush and on the Portobello Road, for whom he embodied the cool, transgressive sass that Norman Mailer in ‘The White Negro’ had claimed white bohos habitually seek from black people. Eager to profit from the rise of colour consciousness which followed decolonisation and the emergence of the American Civil Rights movement, De Freitas changed ...”

“... indifferent to the frivolous. With the exception of an occasional movie (both Lionel Trilling and Norman Podhoretz engaged in cinematic cinq-à- sept), mass culture’s pleasures were hard to admit. Clement Greenberg argued in a 1939 PR essay that kitsch drew on ‘simulacra of genuine culture’. Apart from drinking a lot, the PR writers were American Jewish ...”

“... comic. Pym valiantly kept up with new writers: Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Sylvia Plath, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs. A James Baldwin novel, she wrote to Larkin, quoting the publishers’ blurb, was indeed ‘powerful’. She thought it ‘a very well-written book, but so upsetting – one is really glad never to have had the chance of ...”

“... He signed up with the grandiosely titled Committee for the Free World, run by Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, and then let his sponsorship lapse when the same outfit published hysterical slanders against Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. In the argument about standardised courses in ‘Western Civilisation’, he ...”

“... There were also early biographies by Marilyn’s friends (the columnist Sidney Skolsky, the poet Norman Rosten) and her enemies – Marilyn, the Tragic Venus, based on the incriminating fibs of Hollywood scribe Nunnally Johnson. There have been plenty of biographies by people who worked for Marilyn, by her housekeeper Eunice Murray, her cleaner Lena ...”

“... on topics such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron, Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the non-distinction between poetry and prose. ‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the heroic ...”

“... Globus, then the heads of Cannon Films, to make a film version of King Lear, with a script (!) by Norman Mailer, in which Mailer and his daughter would star as Lear and Cordelia. After half a day’s shooting, Mailer and his daughter walked off the set and Godard tore up the ...”

“... Hardy, Lawrence and Nabokov have also occupied his attention significantly. He seems to loathe Norman Mailer and Peter Carey.) There was a hiatus of 14 years between the stories in Emerald Blue (1995) and the publication of Barley Patch (2009), the first of four books Murnane classifies not as novels or stories but simply ‘fictions’. In these ...”

“... 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 case of Mr Setty ...”

“... force of that passage. She spoke about her ex-friends as if they were research that went wrong. Norman Mailer had been ‘nice’ in the early days but he got above himself and had too many big ideas. To her, he was just a boy rolling at her feet, and she disliked the idea that journalism could be about analysis and penetration, as well as the work of ...”