Search Results

Advanced Search

61 to 71 of 71 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Trapped with an Incubus

Clair Wills: Shirley Hazzard, 21 September 2023

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life 
by Brigitta Olubas.
Virago, 564 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 349 01286 5
Show More
Show More
... Picasso, Degas); travelled to Egypt and the Caribbean; in New York they knew Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Alfred Kazin, John Cheever, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Eleanor Clark.When Hazzard met Steegmuller, he was engaged in an on-off relationship with another woman, or so he said. ‘Everybody knew’ he was gay, according to ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
Show More
Show More
... novelists and poets in these pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously ...

Seductress Extraordinaire

Terry Castle: The vampiric Mercedes de Acosta, 24 June 2004

‘That Furious Lesbian’: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta 
by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 210 pp., £16.95, June 2004, 0 8093 2579 9
Show More
Women in Turmoil: Six Plays 
by Mercedes de Acosta, edited by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 252 pp., £26.95, June 2003, 0 8093 2509 8
Show More
Show More
... mesmerised Alice B. Toklas admired her ‘dear Mercedes’s’ indestructible chic. According to Truman Capote, de Acosta was by far the best card to hold in the café society game known as International Daisy Chain, the goal of which was to ‘link people sexually, using as few beds as possible’. (With one lucky stroke you could ‘get to anyone from ...

Toots, they owned you

John Lahr: My Hollywood Fling, 15 June 2023

Hollywood: The Oral History 
edited by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson.
Faber, 739 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 0 571 36694 1
Show More
Show More
... by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa Monica Mountains, then banking briefly over the Pacific, I glanced ...

Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: The Other Atticus Finch, 30 July 2015

... the myth of effortless achievement, making it clear that talent isn’t always its own best judge. Truman Capote’s childhood friend – Harper Lee and Capote grew up in the same small town in Alabama – may have come to know, at last, that success breeds its own vices, not least of which is the market’s ...

A Common Assault

Alan Bennett: In Italy, 4 November 2004

... promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the peerless Rita’ (the script was by Truman Capote). If this equally humourless young doctor cherishes such showbiz longings I am not to know, as throughout his grisly embroidery he utters no word. ‘Nearly done’ or ‘Just one stitch more!’ would have helped, even in Italian. But nothing ...

The Unstoppable Upward

James Wolcott: ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’, 24 January 2019

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 864 pp., £35, November 2018, 978 0 224 10188 2
Show More
Show More
... which is wider among homosexuals than among heterosexuals.’ Asked in the same interview why Truman Capote loathed him, Bellow replied: ‘I don’t know enough about homosexual psychology to be able to explain it.’ The interview appeared in the May 1997 issue, three years before the publication of Ravelstein, and this arched eyebrow of animus ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2000, 25 January 2001

... interest. I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia – though I’m not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself. As usual I’m repelled by how ‘poetic’ it all is – their fierce quarrels and affections and all the fish, blood and bone of the ...

Lustmord

John Burnside: Fred and Rosemary West, 10 December 1998

Happy like Murderers 
by Gordon Burn.
Faber, 390 pp., £17.99, September 1998, 0 571 19546 6
Show More
Show More
... Happy like Murderers reads more like a novel than a documentary. In this respect, it recalls Truman Capote’s ‘novel of fact’, In Cold Blood, which made compelling fiction out of the brutal and senseless murder of an apparently typical American family in rural Kansas, and created a new genre on the way. ‘Brutal’ and ‘senseless’ are, of ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
Show More
Show More
... was not alone in possessing glossy sex appeal. The young Gore Vidal boasted matinee-idol looks, Truman Capote beheld the camera like a debauched cherub on the back jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms, and Joan Didion, posed against a Corvette Stingray in a long stately dress and sandals, was a chic postcard for California dreamin’. But Sontag ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
Show More
Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
Show More
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
Show More
Show More
... Norman Mailer might crackle before the TV cameras, Gore Vidal might manicure his aperçus and Truman Capote flick his malice, but Roth had no desire to hop on the carousel horse.Post-Portnoy, he mastered the art of emerging and receding from the media spotlight, surfacing when he had a squalling new novel to promote and granting a few key interviews ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences