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“... boring’, the future King Edward VIII a man of ‘wide-ranging interests’, and Norman Mailer, who married her elder daughter, ‘dynamic’ Her attendance at the 1936 Olympics enables her to tell us that Hitler had clammy hands, and that the von Ribbentrops owned ‘heavy, Wagnerian sofas’. She says that ‘Father did care, very ...”

“... do I preach’), his politics (‘I’m a Tory who votes Labour. A “Left Conservative” as Norman Mailer so charmingly and conveniently puts it’), even his class (‘in any dialectical analysis ... we are part of them, the bosses, and should be pulled down’). At once defensive yet assured, such self-scrutiny is a disarming feature of many of ...”

“... profoundly insightful’ (Toni Morrison); ‘a putative classic … fine and impeccable style’ (Norman Mailer); ‘an extremely important literary document, elegantly written and impeccably argued’ (E.L. Doctorow). Norton should distribute little blue sachets of salt, like the ones you used to get in packets of crisps, with this volume, but it’s ...”

“... and sent to Korea in 1953, he thought he’d been given a terrific literary opportunity – Norman Mailer had launched his career with The Naked and the Dead a few years earlier – but Barthelme’s unit arrived the day the truce was signed. Given a job in the Public Information Office, he had plenty of time to write, and soon reported that ‘THE ...”

“... it goes, and its prevalence underlies the second-rate-ness of the bulk of English football. Norman Mailer has written that one way of understanding boxing is to think of it as a kind of argument, a clash in which ideas and their refutations are enacted through the body rather than through language. I don’t know enough about boxing to know whether ...”

“... people into her fiction more naturally than Monimbo manages with, for instance, Castro and Norman Mailer. Her good American English is laced with wisecracks, sad-funny like Woody Allen’s, clever-naive like Salinger’s. The English dialogue of Monimbo is very poor, by comparison. At one point, the Mossgrave Partnership attempts to create a ...”

“... chroniclers of that process, in full awareness of the ambiguity of the verb ‘to forge’. As Norman Mailer used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist? Philip Roth, like John Updike, is a survivor from the glory days of the heavyweights, the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Bellows. His first book, the story ...”

“... delusion of enhanced objectivity and its opportunities for a smirking inwardly-directed irony, is Norman Mailer. Richardson wouldn’t have relished Mailer and didn’t like Sterne. He was incapable of the flippancy with which they expressed their egos, though there’s an attempt at comedy in his self-portrait. And ...”

“... that of another great American novelist who wrote journalism that was pervaded by his personality: Norman Mailer. Monstrousness was the thing Mailer was always trying to enact and the thing Wallace was always trying to deflect or recover from. Wallace was consumed by guilt even on the page; ...”

“... of him. ‘They say no man is an island,’ Collins said. ‘Well, Neil is kind of an island.’ Norman Mailer had a hard time when it came to writing about the astronauts, and with the Apollo 11 mission generally. The three pieces he wrote for Life in the autumn of 1969 became a book, A Fire on the Moon – the Penguin edition has Armstrong’s photo ...”

“... Cold War hardliners, such as Melvyn Lasky, Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Coser. And perhaps most enduring in their contribution, if only because they partook of all wings and of none, the Europeanised cultural and literary Modernists ...”

“... This evangelical Americanism was assisted not only by the ‘militant Christian’ belief, as Norman Mailer described it, that America is ‘the only force for good that can rectify the bad’. America’s presumed leadership of the free world also bred an atmosphere of solemn conformity among many of its expensively educated middle-class and ...”

“... to write about the case. There is no shock-value remaining in stories of media vampirism: Norman Mailer used it up with The Executioner’s Song. Neither is there much mileage left in the documentary/fiction form he realised so brilliantly, for Mailer’s book is a lesson in the limits of our ability to tell ...”

“... that an understanding of female sexuality has taken over twenty years, or to know how very badly Norman Mailer behaved in New York Town Hall in 1972. Alternatively, the writer can take herself as the subject of the collection, and its various parts as the items of a life history. There are various ways of doing this. A young and naive writer will prune ...”

“... In Cold Blood, which was the inspiration for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) and Don DeLillo (Libra). In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her much anthologised ...”