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“... 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 ...”

“... now wrote as ‘the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom’. (Less pleased were Norman Mailer, whose first wife divorced him after reading it; the pope, who banned it; and François Mauriac, who told a contributor to Les Temps modernes that ‘your employer’s vagina has no secrets from me.’)The Second Sex germinated in conversations ...”

“... the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set ...”

“... the footsteps of Mr Kurtz’. And not only Kurtz. After Conrad came Gide, Greene, Kapuściński, Mailer and Naipaul. Congo is endlessly fertile literary terrain. Seven years of war there – in a country the size of Western Europe with a population of almost seventy million – occupied fewer column inches in the Western press than seven weeks of war in the ...”

“... In the current issue of a magazine called The Face there is an article on Norman Mailer’s recent visit to this country. He was here, it seems, to promote Tough guys don’t dance, his latest novel: he did some ‘major’ TV interviews, a bit of radio, and – towards the end of his stint – he called a press conference in order to complain about the low quality of the reviews he had been getting ...”

“... PEN Congress held this January in New York may ironically have been the new timeliness which Norman Mailer’s outbursts bestowed on feminist consideration of masculinity, misogyny and writing. Mailer, president of PEN and chief organiser and fundraiser for the huge writers’ conference, shed his new persona as ...”

“... a fucked-out burn-out who still has a seductive way with words. To borrow a word from Norman Mailer, Tynan was a sexologue – an ideologue about sex. He was an admirer of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, about whom he was writing a book-length study (never completed). With his once-voguish theories about armoured personalities and ...”

“... is as powerful and precise as anything O’Brien has written. Unlike Stephen Crane or Hemingway or Mailer (to whom he has palpable debts), he cannot accommodate war within a stable vision of the horrors of human life; there is no intense exploration of the test of courage we must all face. War for O’Brien is a morbid interruption, a bloody eccentricity. It ...”

“... in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us’), Sontag keeps her cool in a raucous setting ...”

“... been a Dodgers fan) and wrote the liner notes for Cassius Clay’s I Am the Greatest. She met Norman Mailer, ‘whom she liked immensely’, and George Plimpton and James Baldwin, ‘a fine youth’; in 1968 Harry Belafonte invited her onto The Tonight Show along with Petula Clark and Dionne Warwick; he had been going to ask Robert Kennedy but ...”

“... is certainly embarrassing in its crudity and naivety, and it is one of those blemishes that leads Norman Mailer to call JFK ‘one of the worst great movies ever made’. The question I want to raise is whether the worst parts of JFK are separable from its greatness, or at least (since I’m not really sure it is a great movie), whether they are ...”

“... recognise. ‘It seemed to me,’ William Styron wrote, ‘an act of willed destruction.’ Even Norman Mailer thought it was ‘not even bold, but rash’. They never had anything to do with him again. He had cut their throats, so to speak. In his correspondence with people in Kansas, the most touching letters are to Alvin Dewey III, the son of the ...”

“... or in the times to which they bore witness. The same pendulum was on the move in the work of Norman Mailer, another diabolical dualist, another man of the Left whose sense of a stalking evil drew him to the right. Duality has done its bit to distract American socialism, and to instruct it. To a charge of complicity with the student protesters of the ...”

“... for the ferry across the Styx’ – but he was present at the notorious occasion in 1960 when Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. His name appeared on a guest list published in the newspapers, and Schwartz considered the possibility that the whole thing ‘may have been – probably was – a set-up’, part of an attempt by ...”

“... essay ‘The Intellectual and Jewish Fate’, published in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1957, Norman Podhoretz, the patron saint of neoconservative Zionists in the 1980s, said nothing at all about the Holocaust.Jewish organisations that became notorious for policing opinion about Zionism at first discouraged the memorialisation of Europe’s Jewish ...”