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“... Wittgenstein: ‘Now that is all I want: if it should be God’s will. Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbuchlein, “To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby”. That is what I would have liked to say about my work.’ After Wittgenstein’s death in Cambridge the small group of his friends gathered there ...”

“... and occasional enormity of his ego – as well as his lifelong obsession with size and comparison. Norman MacCaig, who knew him well, thought MacDiarmid was an ‘egomaniac’; Seamus Heaney has described him as ‘very egocentric’. Neither of them, sensibly, thinks that an imperfect or monstrous life makes much difference to the poetry. But if poetry ...”

“... the advertisements, the newsreel and the main feature. No one dreamed of starting a novel on page 72, or dropping into the Old Vic mid-Hamlet (though perhaps music hall worked the same way; was that the origin of the movie habit?), and not even the smallest child would let anyone get away with starting their bedtime story halfway through, but the flicks ...”

“... grotesque events are easily forgotten. Thorpe and the others were accused of conspiring to murder Norman Scott; Thorpe, additionally, of inciting the murder of Scott. The latter claimed to have been Thorpe’s lover, and stated that a gunman had shot his dog and attempted to shoot him on Porlock Moor. The gunman, Andrew Newton, said he had been hired to ...”

“... I came across one which had a solitary stamp mounted in the middle of it. Why it was stuck on a page to itself I had not the faintest idea and I still have not the slightest clue as to how it got there, or from where I got it ... but what was most important, this stamp of mine had its centre completely upside down! That was quite enough to raise my ...”

“... Frank Kermode’s review of the new Gissing biography (page 9) brings to mind a project which I have long thought someone ought to tackle: a fearless update of New Grub Street. The job wouldn’t be too taxing – indeed, in many cases, it would be all too easy to attach contemporary names to Gissing’s sunken literary types: his principled dullards as well as his sleek chancers ...”

“... In 1979 there appeared Norman Mailer’s long book The Executioner’s Song – a thousand paperback pages, as it subsequently became, on the strange case of Gary Gilmore, the murderer who insisted on being put to death, insisted that the state keep its word.* In March of the following year, in the London Review of Books, the book was examined at length by Christopher Ricks, whose piece was reprinted – at Mailer’s suggestion, or so I was told at the time – in the form of an advertisement in the New York Review of Books ...”

“... one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz and his wife, the writer and editor Midge Decter, one of the power couples of the Upper West Side intelligentsia – the junior version of Lionel and Diana Trilling. Kazin, a Commentary contributor going back to 1945, found himself in a bobbing ...”

“... by a lot of painstaking but washy verse masquerading as poetry . . . I felt I wanted a whole page adv. in the next issue explaining that I have nothing whatever to do with the N.S. nowadays. ‘Some people will like W-[illegible]’ you feel sure. I am sure too. But they are people of whom the Statesman has few amongst its readers & would like to have ...”

“... has lately written an exceptionally searching essay about British poetry since 1945,* in which Norman MacCaig is named just once in passing. There is nothing wrong with that; Crozier isn’t attempting one of those limp ‘surveys’ in which everyone who deserves mention gets it. All the same I have the impression that a nod in passing – usually, it’s ...”

“... pieces, preferably with a direct link to violent crime, for a tabloid newspaper. His name is Norman Miller, but its similarity to Norman Mailer’s no longer gives him the pleasure it did when his pretensions, if not his values, were higher (an encounter with Mailer at the time of the Foreman-Ali fight in Zaire is one ...”

“... Graham Greene which originally appeared in the summer and autumn of last year. The biographers are Norman Sherry, Anthony Mockler, Leopoldo Duran and Michael Shelden. The actual information they provide must by now be common knowledge among those who are at all interested in Greene, including those who have simply read the many highly communicative ...”

“... on the gossamer constructions of current art theory? You get ringing in your ears when you read Norman Bryson, and fear you have caught Ménière’s disease off the page? Do not despair. There is a remedy. The second posthumous volume of Edgar Wind’s essays outdoes even its sumptuous predecessor in intellectual glitter ...”

“... in the LRB (22 October 1992) that ‘when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming “Hi, Norman!” in the index, next to Mailer’s name.’ The index discloses a lot about the nature of a book, and the passions of its author, more than is sometimes realised ...”

“... is no preface, foreword, introduction or blurb, and nothing about the compiler. After the title-page come three impacted pages of copyright acknowledgments and then we are plunged straight into Ability, Abnegation, Abnormality and Abortion. However, if one seeks out the hardback edition, published not long ago, and is lucky enough to find it still wearing ...”