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“... find in your Funk and Wagnall’s); most of all, in the calculated scabrousness of some episodes. Truman Capote’s title, which is also the title of a book his hero has written, is taken from St Teresa: ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ What this may foretell – other than, perhaps, that couplings will end in ...”

“... than most of us are going to need. Is the evil found or imagined? The writers of the film – Truman Capote and William Archibald, the author of the stage play on which it was based – were accused of going too much for the ‘psychological’ reading of James’s tale, most famously advanced by Edmund Wilson: there are no ghosts, it’s all in the ...”

“... the writers themselves or their publishers. Bennett Cerf sought the bureau’s help on behalf of Truman Capote when he went to Kansas to research In Cold Blood. Because the agents hadn’t read his stuff in the New Yorker they declined to provide a reference. Ayn Rand, a veteran HUAC snitch, offered her own collection of clippings of literary attempts ...”

“... high-placed Papas, and without interruption now and then from sceptical oldies like Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, the tale of Edie might easily have drooled off into a dreary catalogue of hippy-scene excess. As it is, the book shrewdly keeps the straight world in its sights: a nicely judged mix of the titillating and the admonitory. After ...”

“... Colbert, their Jamaica neighbour Noël Coward), but details of their social life are sketchy. When Truman Capote pays a visit, Fleming writes to Ann: ‘Can you imagine a more incongruous playmate for me?’ He seems happiest discussing technical details, as when a gun expert, Geoffrey Boothroyd, wrote to say that Bond shouldn’t be packing a Beretta ...”

“... to be the ‘assistant researchist’ on the gruesome true crime story that her childhood friend Truman Capote was writing for the New Yorker. Without Lee, Capote might have had trouble getting the people of Holcomb, Kansas to open up about the slaughtered Clutter family. Lee was the daughter of Methodists very like ...”

“... friend brought her the reviews of her Collected Works. The book, which carried an introduction by Truman Capote, had finally brought Bowles’s writing to a wider audience than what she called ‘my five hundred goony friends’. Bowles was unable to read the clippings. A stroke had damaged her eyesight so she struggled to read anything but children’s ...”

“... winners of ugly-contests are bombarded with offers of marriage. So what happens to somebody like Truman Capote? Amis interviewed him quite brilliantly but you can see how desperate the fun must have been. Capote was a celebrity at 16, a multi-millionaire at 40, and dead at 59. ‘All the excess, solipsism, paranoia ...”

“... for the movie – her version of life on the Nile. Although she ventriloquises Arthur Miller and Truman Capote, hers (or that of the actress representing the actress) is the only live voice we hear in the play.There are plenty of stellar candidates for the role of wrong (or right) Norma, such as the early Hollywood actress Norma Shearer, or the even ...”

“... likes to call his books ‘non-fiction novels’ and cites In Cold Blood as his inspiration. But Truman Capote, who used the term himself, always stressed the author’s absence: for him this was the genre’s defining challenge. Carrère, by contrast, is everywhere on the page, revelling in his role as storyteller. He’s a casual presence ...”

“... Avedon (photographer), Tamasaburo Bando (kabuki actor), Cecil Beaton (photographer/designer) and Truman Capote (author). He arrived in Tokyo at a time when Mount Fuji could be seen from all over the city because the intervening buildings had recently been incinerated by American bombs; he is still going strong today, as the Japanese nervously brace ...”

“... can be traced to a world of influential men. That fist belongs to – J. Edgar Hoover? Roy Cohn? Truman Capote? The daisy chain doesn’t stop. A hostile critic in the Village Voice will write that the famous photo of a black man in a suit ‘with his fly open and his elephant cock sticking out’ is ‘ugly, degrading, obscene – typical of the ...”

“... for Michelangelo. Since REM’s 1995 Monster tour, Stipe, once as elfinly beautiful as the young Truman Capote, has affected a shaven-headed, emaciated look. Scurrilous columnists have suggested that Stipe’s shaven pate is a version of the Bruce Willis baldness cure. On his latest video he poses naked and writhing. The spectacle of this ...”

“... he believed was his position at the head of the post-World War Two pack. He wasn’t pleased when Truman Capote appeared on his tail, and was infuriated when Capote professed an intimacy with André Gide greater than his own – though this proved to be Capote’s ...”

“... William Faulkner. Tiny. Absolutely minuscule. Nearest thing to a homunculus. Made Truman Capote look like Steve Reeves’) and there is a splendid sequence concerning the after-effects of a vigorous game of squash on a well-preserved but stiffening older man (‘Lancelot moved to the ticket hall like a slow loris ...’ ‘Wheeling slowly ...”