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“... five nights a week’ on TV. Their house was the place for parties, where guests included Norman Mailer and Spotted Eagle, a Native American chief who liked ‘radical-chic pussy’. Still, the Sixties didn’t do the Ayer-Wells marriage much good: Dee increasingly saw Freddie as an ‘uptight old fart’ and he thought her ‘a loudmouthed ...”

“... and irrelevant’. Over the years, a lot of these effete and irrelevant artists – John Updike, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen – have launched tirades against him. The most concise comes from John Irving, commenting red-faced and furious on live TV: ‘Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping write! He’s not a writer! Just crack one of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Moynihan announced in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. Herzog, in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that movement. It is a masterpiece, the first the movement has produced.’ Herzog not only had critics ...”

“... decreed the tawdry pleasure dome of the permissive society, designed this ‘pandaemonium’. Norman Mailer and James Baldwin made things worse by recommending violence. And Noam Chomsky had the nerve to protest against the violence of America in Vietnam. Paul Johnson’s is a forceful and funny book; even those who don’t like it could well enjoy ...”

“... His main characteristic was cynicism. And yet his friends included Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Norman Mailer, Barbara Walters (they almost married), Cardinal Spellman, nearly all the top Mafia people, Richard Nixon, Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, William F. Buckley, an endless list of Congressmen and judges and society ...”

“... of adult life that remain to be learned; the photo and the friendship are shuffled into the past. Norman Mailer reported on the Liston-Patterson fight for Esquire in dispatches that were uncharacteristically equivocal. In his account, victory is Liston’s because Patterson fought like a man down with jaundice, but that does not prevent Liston from being ...”

“... a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists’: if Norman Mailer had been thinking aphoristically, he might have dropped the last four words and touched up the remainder. ‘Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has ...”

“... another former literary phenom once said: ‘We wanted to change the nature of American life,’ Norman Mailer told a French television interviewer in 1994. ‘None of us ended up as heroes; we ended up as ...”

“... is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and Stone’s Americans abroad, he ...”

“... the English department at Upper St Clair High School, however, the writing of David Halberstam, Norman Mailer, Larry King and Marshall Frady, to name just a handful of the Morris Boys, was considered precocious troublemaking, and duly expelled from class as stylistically, politically and just about every other way-ally unfit for consumption or ...”

“... still remembered for quoting at length from the novels of William Faulkner.Styron’s​ ex-friend Norman Mailer once told me a story about Faulkner and the Paris Review. The late Jean Stein, sometime in the 1950s, had an affair with Faulkner, and they had sex in the loggia of her father’s Hollywood swimming pool. He was so disgusted he had the loggia ...”

“... you are not the owners.’‘We have driven Cuba inch by inch into alliance with the Soviet,’ Norman Mailer wrote, ‘as deliberately and insanely as a man setting out to cuckold himself.’ Castro never wanted to be beholden to the Soviets. He had downplayed the role of the local Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular) in preparing the ground ...”

“... auto-destruct apparatus is probably beyond the capabilities of psychiatric case study. Norman Mailer or Mary McCarthy might have had a better shot at evoking what makes Rudy tick, much as Mailer examined the biomechanics of the ‘New Nixon’ in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and McCarthy taxonomised the ...”

“... nuts with the boredom and hang one on somebody. But I am being very restrained. I am waiting for Norman Mailer who is a glass-jawed punk with no defence. I fell over a cloud yesterday and busted my arm in two places. Doc said it was the worst double fracture he had seen since the 16th century. Busted the humerus clean off at the end and the whole elbow ...”