The right-wing kingpin and a Napoleonic firebrand

Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shook The Sixties

Kevin M Schultz

Norton Books, €23.90

‘Read Norman Mailer, or get a new tailor,” sang Lloyd Cole all the way back in 1984. But no one was ever going to write a song, much less a good one, about William F Buckley. Tall, well-bred, drawling, sharp-suited and patrician, his stock-in-trade was steel-ruler conservatism of the kind that didn’t tend to travel well outside ...