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“... have been thoroughly damaged and will not be effective for quite some number of years,’ General Norman Schwarzkopf said on US television on 20 January, four days after the beginning of the air war in support of the liberation of Kuwait. Iraq’s ability to build nuclear weapons, he stressed, was at an end. The reactors in question were two small research ...”

“... reflected that, while kind hearts and simple faith were excellent things in their way, a hint of Norman blood would do no harm. Like Joyce, writing obsessively about the Ireland he had quitted, he achieved fame as a chronicler of the family, the institution from which he fought a long campaign to escape. Slightly inconsistently, he married, after a long ...”

“... His bushy hair is white and cropped more conservatively than in the past ... his eyes are clear and surprisingly blue. He moves with the grace of the boxer he has sometimes pretended to be ... his ample waist looks solid rather than soft ... He is remarkably fit for a man of 60, which is what he became last Jan 31 ...”

“... airlifted out, or Kiowa, who is grenaded, and drowns in a field of Vietnamese excrement, or poor Norman Bowker, who goes back to America after his one year of combat, but can’t find work, can’t adjust, and kills himself. O’Brien told his own story – compellingly, wrenchingly – in his memoir If I die. He grew up in the rural quarantine of ...”

“... be seeing Y’ (‘Oh good, give my regards to Y’). ‘And on Friday, I’m having lunch with Norman Podhoretz.’ At this, the table froze. ‘You’re doing what? I repeated it, gently but with resolution, and the freeze froze even deeper. ‘But, but’ – and this with genuinely aghast reproach – ‘but, Ian, really, why? This little scene, or ...”

“... labour. The roads are rough and slow, the burnt-out carcasses of former vehicles accrue, as do the white crosses on the rocks which both indicate past accidents and help to avoid the next; driving at night is not recommended. ‘Look! Look!’ yelped our driver, catching sight of a sleek black ribbon undulating tantalisingly in the distance. ‘Tarmac! That ...”

“... history, the stuff he taught, to forever be the centre of everyone’s attention. What a few white men thought, and did.’ The changing mind of Suwelo, as he painfully learns to place the definitions of academic history in a different context, is one of the threads that draw together this complicated book. His wife is caught up in another story, for she ...”

“... a window in its polished surface. I would set my foot on that slick of black ice, its luminous white line would lead me before long over the horizon of my father’s head. The Mouthful Flights of steel-tipped arrows pass across my father’s face as he looks around the table. His widow’s peak is pulled down like a ...”

“... stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the afternoon of 10 April 2007 I was on a ...”

“... counterpart. The ruling class of England, and much of the rest of Britain, was re-created by the Norman Conquest. Most of the nobly born have at one time or another sought to find progenitors among the Companions of the Conqueror, and the words ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ and ‘aristocrat’ themselves come from French. Within two decades, the Conquest had ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”

“... ones, places where the culture was popular not high, then a pile of the Saturday Evening Post with Norman Rockwell’s covers was likely to have been a solace, and an entertainment. In my case it was New Zealand. My wife remembers sharpening her wits on the Post’s ‘Perfect Squelch’ column. I found a pile of Posts in the alcove of the hospital where the ...”

“... saw her in terms of ‘belongings in apple-pie order, labelled, folded, scented and camphored’, white damask napkins and ‘the heavy white china plates she always got from Antinori in Rome’. Lovers may have noticed these things too, more than their owner perhaps, as is implied in the very svelte poem called ‘Notes on ...”

“... and specials, became the reporters’ reporter, the producers’ producer, and he later brought in Norman Mailer to write the book. He showed himself to be the king deal-maker and media broker, the chief documenter, of grand-scale American tragedy. Wherever there has been sensational news in America over the last thirty years, there you will invariably find ...”

“... This book is ostensibly about six literary figures with whom Norman Podhoretz, for 35 years the editor-in-chief of Commentary, was closely involved from the early Fifties until the early Seventies: Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer ...”