SOURCE: Lemann, Nicholas. “The Outcast.” Washington Monthly 31, nos. 1-2 (January-February 1999): 37-40.

In the following review, Lemann examines the evolution of Podhoretz's relationships with his past associates as described in Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

I had a distinctly middle-aged moment when I picked up the galley proof of Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends. The publisher's blurb on the inside cover says: “[T]his memoir of some of the key intellectual battles of the last 30 years offers a rare, firsthand portrait of the New York intellectuals—‘American Bloomsbury’ as they have been called—by one of the few surviving members.” The phrase “American Bloomsbury” was coined, I believe, not by the etherous passive-voice-denoted entity of the blurb but by me, in the pages of this magazine, in a review of Alexander Bloom's Prodigal Sons published in 1986.

What I meant...