Search Results

“... function of indexes since the great days of white male writers, when William F. Buckley sent Norman Mailer a copy of his book The Unmaking of a Mayor and wrote ‘Hi!’ in the index next to Mailer’s name. Job’s comforters will want to be the first to tell you that the entry for ‘clocks and sundials’ in ...”

“... but disconcerting. They’re like Nabokov tearing strips off Edmund Wilson over Eugene Onegin, or Norman Mailer beating up on his rivals for Heavyweight Champion of the Novel. And they tread all over the melancholy Sondheim shares with Hart. Sondheim once wrote a play of his own, Getting Away with Murder (that old theme), but it flopped. Here, in his ...”

“... Reich and act accordingly!”’ He had captured the imagination of the ‘counterculture’. Norman Mailer, who dismissed psychoanalysts as ‘ball shrinkers’, promoted him in the Village Voice (‘intellectuals,’ he told Turner, ‘never had good orgasms’). For Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs he was the only analyst worth taking seriously ...”

“... Pop Art collage, it consecrated absolute celebrity, the President and the King. The presidency, Norman Mailer observed during Nixon’s 1972 bid for re-election, is ‘a primitive office and inspires the tribes of America to pick up the modes and manners of their chief’. Two genres that thrived under the Nixon presidency were the law-and-order ...”

“... writer of prose, and after the Second World War, every male contender – William Styron, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Jones, Joseph Heller – had done some service and wanted to write literary masterpieces filled with the perfumes of combat.* It is only in more recent times that the task of writing novels about battle has fallen chiefly to ...”

“... shoes – frowning as she walked without hesitation across the room and introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book ...”

“... The chief enchantment of this book has not to do with the celebrated dust-ups between himself and Mailer, himself and Capote, himself and Tennessee Williams, or himself and William Buckley. Rather, we learn, not without preceding markers but in many ways for the first time, about Vidal’s family and about the Kennedy branch of it. We come to understand how ...”

“... among the worthies and elderly comedians. Booze started to turn up more regularly as the luxury. Norman Mailer asked for a stick of the best marijuana. Plomley: ‘This is illegal talk, Mr Mailer!’ Desert Island Discs’ famous roster became its most distinguishing quality – an invitation was an accolade and ...”

“... heterosexual confidence also looms large in Hitchens’s encounters with the somewhat less dapper Norman Mailer. They fell out spectacularly after Hitchens asked Mailer during a TV show that also featured Germaine Greer whether ‘he’d ever wondered about his apparent obsession with sodomy and its male occasions (the ...”

“... walked around for days exhilarated by the change in the literary weather.’ He was encouraging of Norman Mailer without puffing him up, and he was also worried for him: ‘Mailer’s performance here’ – in Advertisements for Myself – ‘reminds me of the brilliant talker who impresses the hell out of you at a ...”

“... it is not out of the question that in making his speech for the defence he may sometimes have had Norman Mailer in mind. It is certainly a subject for Mailer, and might have made one for Dostoevsky. But it is also a treacherous subject. Its unknown quantities – which include an under-examined Northern social ...”

“... world – prostitutes – are least in a position to utilise this invaluable experience as art. Norman Mailer has said that there won’t be a really great woman writer – one, you understand, con cojones and everything – until the first call-girl tells her story. Though it’s reasonable to assume that, when she does, ...”

“... physically nauseating. Schaeffer’s soldiers swear with a crudity that would satisfy ex-rifleman Norman Mailer. The third section of Buffalo Afternoon, and the most interesting, covers Pete’s 25 years after Vietnam and his inability to pick up the bits of his civilian life. He becomes a victim of post-combat psychosis. He is randomly violent; cannot ...”

“... French language to get away with iconoclastic pornography – that is, if you take it seriously. Norman Mailer gets away with it by clowning; so does Burroughs. Acker makes the mistake of taking herself seriously here, as though ‘ultimate outrage’ were not a commodity being peddled by her agents and publishers as assiduously as ‘towering ...”

“... Bush and on the Portobello Road, for whom he embodied the cool, transgressive sass that Norman Mailer in ‘The White Negro’ had claimed white bohos habitually seek from black people. Eager to profit from the rise of colour consciousness which followed decolonisation and the emergence of the American Civil Rights movement, De Freitas changed ...”