News about Norman Mailer

With her tumbling auburn hair, green eyes, alabaster skin and seductive Irish brogue, Edna O'Brien was as glamorous as any of the women whose lives filled the pages of her best-selling novels. But there was one critical difference: a delicious aura of scandal and intrigue clung to the writer, who has died at the age of 93. Right up until old age she remained a spell-binding femme fatale about whom men, captivated by her beauty, were inclined to tell tall tales. For women, she was celebrated not just for the vividness of her prose but also for challenging conventions about their role - and particularly about sex.

Le Carré, Adam Sisman, aka John Le Carré (pictured), as his prospective biographer in 2010, cited'my personal life' as one of the things that made him extremely worried about the prospect. Well, yes, and Sisman's biography came out in 2015, when Le Carré and his second wife Jane were still alive. It was a sanitized account that left the bulk of the'messy personal life' out, on Le Carré's insistence and Sisman's annoyance.' After David and Jane were dead, Le Carré's son told Sisman that he should keep a "secret annexe" for publication. Both couples are now deceased, and this book is the 'ethical annexe', a seamy, steamy supplement to the biography, recounting Le Carré's string of extra-marital affairs during their marriages.

ALLISON PEARSON: Today, there are already toxic work environments, where thirty-something women are still afraid of taking time out of their careers. According to one report from 2007, 41% of female graduates born in 1970 were still childless by the age of 35, a dramatic rise of 20% in just over a decade. A third of female university graduates will never have children at all. While some women were fortuviates, there were some women for whom getting pregnant was a good idea, but for those that did not, the obstetricians humbly pointed out that your body, not the manager, would not co-operate.

Without starting a fight, Norman Mailer could not even walk the dog. The Pulitzer-winning New York novelist's one-night in 1956 came home bruised and beaten after being involved in a brawl with two sailors who allegedly disparaged one of his pet poodles as 'queer.' No greater compliment was directed at the self-styled macho man, who was photographed in 1977 with his last wife, Norris Church (an old Bill Clinton flame), draped over him with bare shoulders and plunging cleavage as he reclined at his typewriter, hairy chest, and drink by his side.

CRAIG BROWN: Writers tend to be overlooked, though I do have an old book titled Sleeping With Bad Boys and subtitled: 'A juicy tell-all of literary New York in the 1950s and 1960s.' Alice Denham, the author's former Playboy playmate, wrote in more detail about her obsessions with modern American authors such as Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth ('a sex fiend). . . I was breathless. . . He hung in long and stale ('). Sadly, Ms Denham never appeared to Britain in the 1950s, so she missed out on tweedy, pipe-smoking nights of ferocious literature with our own admired writers of the day, such as J.B. Priestley or J.R.R.R.R. Tolkien. In the meantime, we can now enjoy The Secret Heart by a former John le Carré's family, Suleika Dawson. The book is described as a 'personal memoir.'