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“... trying something new as he is when performing more conventionally on Hardy, Waugh, Ted Hughes and Tom Wolfe. It’s to be hoped, then, that readers won’t be put off this civil and modestly adventurous book by the jokes and sneers of the smart, dismissive reviewers into whose hands anything of this kind is likely to fall. The two I have named in this ...”

“... and Hankinson mentions Gordon Burn in his acknowledgments. The basic strategy of the genre, as Tom Wolfe put it in ‘The New Journalism’, is to recount actual events using the dramatic techniques of the novel: reconstructing the story scene by scene, ‘resorting as little as possible to sheer, historical narrative’; using lots of dialogue and ...”

“... bumper stickers, for example, saying ‘Jane Fonda: John Kerry with Tits’. Phyllis Schlafly and Tom Wolfe have both described the memorial wall as a ‘monument to Jane Fonda’. A set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to describe his ‘lenient and ...”

“... agoraphobic, addicted to Pepsi and Dexedrine, and almost never left his mansion. In 1965 he told Tom Wolfe that he hadn’t been outside for three and a half months and had only left home nine times in the past two years. Why would he? He worked on his eight-foot-wide bed for three or four drug-fuelled days at a time ‘without sleeping or ...”

“... United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all and Warhol saw it coming even before Tom Wolfe did. Ultra Violet, to whom I keep on giving menshes, has asked all who were seduced and profaned by the Sixties to join her in repudiating drugs, sex and parties. She urges Scripture, and tells us of her dreams. (‘Once I broke through to ...”

“... revaluation of the borders between journalism and fiction and inspiring, among others, Mailer and Tom Wolfe. It gave a push to the notion that the pale artifices of fiction were irrelevant to the Sixties. The novel was declared dead. In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, The Armies of the Night, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – these ...”

“... score of Indians, Nazis, pythons, Zulus and midget Japanese aircraft had been shattered by Tom’s index and middle finger’). The narrator of The Nerve announces, ‘My problem is to transfer to you a degree of intensity,’ and this seems a near-universal ambition in Bragg’s writing. Such grandiloquent gusto doesn’t always escape absurdity (from ...”

“... a bar called Elaine’s’. (The novel is set in 1969, so Yardley is to be imagined drinking with Tom Wolfe, or Truman Capote.) Dexter, a successful novelist who still works as a newspaperman and lives in the sticks, on an island in the Puget Sound, clearly detests Yardley, but Ward is no hero either. At times in Dexter’s fiction, a Ward-like manner ...”

“... demolish the critique of Modernist American architecture concocted by a chauvinist die-hard like Tom Wolfe, his liberalism has its limits. Identity politics plays no role in his understanding of contemporary representation. While he is all for the rights of blacks and gays to free artistic expression he is decidedly less happy with recent feminist ...”

“... approvingly reviews Marquez, commends Henry James, discusses some ‘splendid stuff’ from Tom Wolfe and starts a chapter with Angela Carter on rooms by the hour in Japan. If this is social science, it is in style and scope not social science as we have come to know it. As we have come to know it, this science has, in its more principled ...”

“... depends on the ‘levels of various chemicals in our brains’. We are not being told, to quote Tom Wolfe, ‘Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died’: we are in effect being told that we never had a soul in the first place. If the claims of biogenetics hold, then the choice is between clinging to the illusion of dignity and accepting the reality of what we ...”

“... throw-away, smarty-pants, look-at-me’, which might seem to ally it with the New Journalism of a Tom Wolfe. But Wolfe is a reactionary, and his nasty swipe at modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), must have sickened Banham (who wrote a positive review of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline ...”

“... was nothing his former wife felt she could do to help. As a pilot Armstrong had those attributes Tom Wolfe made famous in his book about the air force test pilots who went on to become the Nasa astronauts. They had ‘the right stuff’: they would always do the most dangerous thing on offer. A day after a failed air force test launch of an Atlas rocket ...”

“... They would also notice some strange inclusions: for example, essays on David Frost, Kenneth Clark, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer – Sixties figures to a man. Booker’s earlier book, The Neophiliacs, he tells us, was ‘a detailed, analytical account of the astonishing changes which had come over Britain in the Fifties and Sixties’. This time he has ...”

“... novel the way lovers of chocolate might look forward to Easter. It was going to be Eudora Welty, Tom Wolfe, Reese Witherspoon and Tammy Faye Bakker in a wild Southern barn dance. It was going to be a roof-raising, hello God hoedown, a complete riot of personal faith, the sentences glinting with rhinestones and Southern Gothic, all of it secured by a ...”