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“... after disclosures that he had sent gifts and messages of support to the businessman Asil Nadir. Norman Lamont caused an uproar over his use of public money to evict a tenant from his property. Other lesser Tories, such as Mrs Thatcher’s successor in Finchley, Hartley Booth, have left office under a moral cloud. Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith are part of a ...”

“... as a promiscuously bisexual alcoholic. One memorable scene had John Updike, a friend and rival – Norman Mailer called Cheever and him ‘the Old Pretender and the Young Pretender of the New Yorker’ – ringing the doorbell and being answered by Cheever, bombed out of his mind and stark naked. Home before Dark struck some people as devotedly ...”

“... not be allowed to put one off reading it. All the economic reasons for not producing black and white pocket catalogues are obvious, and I own and pore over illustrated art books. But I am also sure that paintings sometimes need to be defended from apparatus which seems to celebrate them, but really confuses the relationship which matters most – that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at Tait’s Café on O’Farrell Street and at the Cliff House’. In Frisco, Valentino befriended Norman Kerry (who played a nude scene for Erich von Stroheim). Leider squelches the gay backstory: Rumours of a homosexual relationship between Kerry and Rodolfo persist, but remain just that: rumours . . . The two did form a close bond, and did share an ...”

“... but also draws attention to the fact that they fail to interest his interlocutor, a ‘spectacled white man sitting with a broad census-taker’s portfolio’. The census-taker quickly runs through his list of questions and then departs the story as, in a rather different way, does the man whose name, age, occupation and family background he records: Samuel ...”

“... a collective exercise. The Romantic myth of the lone genius persists. He is no longer always a white man – only most of the time. The black and white author photo is this myth’s icon, the desk its fetish object (now that cigarettes are out of style). What’s missing in this picture? The friends who made ...”

“... a self-advertisement worthy of a base politician. Archigram was a reaction to the purity of the white orthogonal architecture of the 1920s and early 1930s championed by Nikolaus Pevsner, the most conservative of progressives, who described English architecture of the 1950s as ‘not the functionally best solution, nor an economically justifiable ...”

“... D’Ascoyne family, ‘when he wrote: “Kind hearts are more than coronets,/And simple faith than Norman blood”?’ The film suggests that Lord Tennyson was not only far from the mark but off the wall. It’s true that coronets are not everything. There is also money, but that’s it. Dennis Price as Louis, a distant relative of the aristocrats all played ...”

“... Howard’s taxonomy inspired Thomas Rickman to establish the phases of Gothic Architecture – Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular – on the same principle, and Howard’s clouds also lie behind Constable’s. His meticulous sky studies are often annotated in pencil. ‘Cirrus’, he writes on the back of one and ‘wind very brisk & effect ...”

“... dramas of exile were more complex than others. Along with the black Americans, there were also the white ones; for example, the egregious Ginsberg (‘I sat weeping in the Café Select ... I write best when I weep’), the inimitable Burroughs and the indescribably awful Norman Mailer, who used his evenings in Paris with ...”

“... Collected Poems begins: ‘The radiance of that star that leans on me/Was shining years ago.’ Norman MacCaig might have written that in the 1950s. It was in this decade that Jennings’s poetic ear matured, and it remained attuned to verse then fashionable (Metaphysical poetry, Hopkins, mid-Eliot, Auden, Muir). She is a poet who uses a lot of abstract ...”

“... had travelled more than 20 kilometres to arrive at our table.’ To accompany them, ‘pink-and-white peaches with the complexion of a Boucher milkmaid’ and ‘figs so ripe their purple skins had started to split open, threatening to reveal their juicy, red, pornographic interiors’. The House in France is Wells’s account of life with her mother, the ...”

“... time, with a cast of thousands, that stood no chance of ever being completed. (Winogrand admired Norman Mailer, rivalled him in scope, energy, ambition – and in a disdain for any internal system of brakes. As it happens, he photographed Mailer at his fiftieth birthday party in 1973, on the receiving end of a finger-wagging lecture from a guest, so that the ...”

“... to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the ...”