ANYONE who has read Alistair Campbell’s eponymous account of the Blair years knows Tony Blair is already in the running for sainthood, if only for his unremitting kindness to and patience with Campbell and the other infighting inadequates who surrounded him during his leadership of New Labour.

‘THERE is always the shock in seeing him again. Women draw an audible breath. Men look down. They are reminded again of their lack of worth.’

Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country’s literary conscience and provocateur, died of renal failure early today, his literary executor said. He was 84.

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy who in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift and other novels both championed and mourned the soul’s fate in the modern world, has died at 89.