VS Naipaul’s 15-year-long tiff with author and former protégé Paul Theroux, ended with a handshake at the Hay Festival between the two. Vidal likened Mailer’s sumptuously anti-feminist book The Prisoner of Sex as “three days of menstrual flow” and the writer himself to a serial killer. After traversing some distance, Balzac would look back and tell a passerby, “Only if …
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