Precocious

• In November 1975, Truman Capote, the proudly gay author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, unveiled the hotly anticipated second instalment of his unpublished novel, Answered Prayers.
• Capote ended his days a social pariah in his former New York society circles, incapacitated by a lifetime of prodigious substance abuse.
• The story to blame, La Côte Basque, 1965, takes its title from its setting: an achingly fashionable French restaurant in Manhattan.
• However, Mrs. Hopkins was une autre chose: a sensation to unsettle the suavest Côte Basque client.
• Mrs. Kennedy and her sister had elicited not a murmur, nor had the entrances of Lauren Bacall and Katharine Cornell and Clare Booth Luce.
• However, Mrs. Hopkins was une autre chose: a sensation to unsettle the suavest Côte Basque client.

The real-life ‘Mrs. Bang-Bang’

• There was talk of the spate of burglaries that had recently occurred in the area.
• Ann, who suffered from insecurity and social anxiety, drank more than usual.
• Returning home with her husband, she washed down some sleeping pills and went to bed, not long after midnight.
• At two in the morning, Ann was woken by the sound of her dog growling.

‘What I’m writing is true’

• Regardless of whether he truly appreciated this, it seems fair to say Capote’s encounter with Ann Woodward made quite the impression on him.
• Capote’s conception of Answered Prayers, which he struggled with and talked about for decades, developed over time.
• In his monumental novel-cycle Remembrance of Things Past, Proust scrutinised the social machinations of the Parisian upper classes at the turn of the 20th century.
• Capote conceived of his project – which took shape as a roman à clef – in equivalent terms.
• What I’m writing is true, it’s real and it’s done in the very best prose style that I think any American writer could possibly achieve.
• […] If Proust were an American living now in New York, this is what he would be doing.
• What I’m writing is true, it’s real and it’s done in the very best prose style that I think any American writer could possibly achieve.
• as is generally conceded, a beautiful girl of twelve or twenty, while she may merit attention, does not deserve admiration.

Masturbation, misogyny, murder

• At the start of January 1966, Capote signed a contract with Random House for a novel titled Answered Prayers.
• However, by the time he actually sat down to write the book, he was already under a great deal of pressure.
• Masturbation, menstruation, misogyny, murder.
• Readers who thought they were getting a finely wrought piece of social critique were left scratching their heads in bemusement.
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Was the book any good?

With the benefit of hindsight, I think the overwhelming majority missed the memo when it came to Answered Prayers.

• By the same token, it is clear Answered Prayers responds to (and even builds on) advances made in his earlier work.
• Gossip can serve a positive, even joyous function: it is a “social activity which produces and maintains the filiations” of community.
• To put this another way: if used in a strategic and appropriate fashion, gossip can bring people together.
• It can help to build and sustain social groupings predicated on the basis of shared knowledge (of sexual matters).
• Consider Unspoiled Monsters, the first chapter in the posthumously published book.
• If he had been absolutely factual, it would have been less believable but […] it might have been better.

Settling scores

• In part, he was looking to settle scores.
• Try as he might, Capote, who claimed his intentions had been misunderstood, couldn’t win the swans back over.
• As chance, or maybe fate would have it, he died at exactly the same age as Ann Woodward.
• Given how much they despised each other, I can’t help but wonder what Capote and Woodward would have made of such dismal symmetries.

Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• This month, his grandson, John Dos Passos Coggin , announced the launch of his Kickstarter campaign to raise seed money for a new feature film project he wrote, Son of Portugal.
• Son of Portugal is a drama/thriller feature film project set in 1964 in the United States and Portugal.
• John Dos Passos Coggin , an American writer, wrote the script for Son of Portugal.
• He co-manages the John Dos Passos literary estate and serves on the advisory board of the John Dos Passos Society .

• Donald had written an essay called “Mind, body, age” that vigorously burst from the page with life, while addressing death.
• Being out of the loop, no longer an active participant in the cultural life of his beloved Sydney, hurt him.
• In his accomplished and insightful biography Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country, Ryan Cropp puts the man in his context and, without a heavy hand, helps us understand his motivating psychology.
• Good biographies can be like that – Robert Caro is still finishing the biographical series on Lyndon Johnson he started 50 years ago.
• Read more:
  Donald Horne's 'lucky country' and the decline of the public intellectual

The Lucky Country

• Horne is best known as the author of The Lucky Country – a book that seemed to capture the zeitgeist when it was published, reluctantly, by Penguin in 1964.
• The issues explored in The Lucky Country changed with new versions, but the critique remained: Australia got by on luck; it was held back by second-rate leaders who lacked vision, imagination and even a realistic assessment of its place in the world.
• The Lucky Country, which owes more to his journalism than the more ambitiously polished writing in The Education of Young Donald, was a two-way mirror, revealing the nation to itself and him to it.
• Read more:
  An armchair, a desk and 4000 books: the Horne family study gets a second life

Changing contexts

• Cropp shows he has mastered the historian’s essential skill of avoiding this trap, while keeping the narrative moving with fresh and lively writing.
• One striking contrast is between Horne’s confidence in Hayek’s wartime anti-bureaucratic, libertarian ethos, and Gough Whitlam’s rejection of it.
• He was bored and wrote many letters to his mother (like so many others now preserved in archival boxes).
• Times change, contexts shift, and responses by thoughtful people are recalibrated.

Intellectual tradition

• His teachings and methods helped shape a Sydney intellectual tradition that still echoes today.
• For those untouched by this tradition it was mystifying, but for those like Horne, Murray Sayle, Paddy McGuinness and many others, it provided an enduring framework that had the benefit of flexibility.
• The cynical, libertarian realist became, by the late 1960s, more optimistic and more open to what Cropp characterises as “opportunities for civic renewal”.
• The discipline of a biography, even one as grounded in public events as this, is that it demands a singular focus.

The cultural conversation

• The coincidence of the publication of Horne’s Observer, funded by Frank Packer, and Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation in the late 1950s spoke to the need to aerate the national political and cultural conversation.
• Cropp conveys a sense of this through the slightly limited prism of Horne’s worldview, with its emphasis on business, religion, Asia and politics.
• Cropp has captured a full life, well lived, that was a tribute to the importance of paying attention and making a difference.

• These quotes, which would sit comfortably in a Le Carre thriller, come from Nadia Comăneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape (2023).
• Translated from Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth, this book sheds light on state surveillance, lived experience and sport in the Eastern Bloc.

The most famous gymnast in the world

• Put simply, Comăneci, the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of ten in an Olympic event, was, as Olaru points out, “the most famous gymnast in the world”.
• By the autumn of 1969, Comăneci had enrolled at her local gymnastics centre, where she received formal training.
• In 1970, she became the youngest gymnast to win at the Romanian Nationals.
• Comăneci shot to international prominence in 1975 when, at the age of 13, she dominated proceedings at the European Gymnastics Championships.
• Comăneci’s name and score was on everybody’s lips and immediately started to wend their way around the world.
• Read more:
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Influential, abusive coaches

• Béla and Márta Károlyi are two of the most influential and successful coaches in the history of gymnastics.
• They are also extremely controversial - as viewers of Athlete A will already know.
• Consider what Olaru has to say about the pair, who feature prominently in every chapter of his book.
• Only when there was a need to manipulate them did he tell the young gymnasts he cared about them.
• The depressing conclusion Oralu reaches is that the Romanian authorities chose to ignore the multiple warnings that came their way.

America’s gymnastics community knew

• It matters because it’s clear the US gymnastics community was well aware of Károlyi’s reputation.
• Take Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, published in 1995, which exposed the abusive reality of professional gymnastics in the US.
• USA Gymnastics continued to place its trust - and the bodies of its athletes - in Károlyi’s hands.