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“... and nothing to write about. A day or so passed, in this city of sinister charm (once described by Gore Vidal as ‘the Vatican of the John Birch Society’), in an agony of boredom and irrelevance. And then the ABC News Nightline team, the flagship of supposedly serious coverage, announced that it was vacating its skybox and leaving town. No story. Thus ...”

“... Of course I like my country,’ Gore Vidal has written. ‘After all, I’m its current biographer.’ With the publication of The Golden Age, the biography draws to a close. The novels which comprise it, to list them in order of the historical periods they cover, are Burr (1973), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976, of course), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), Washington, DC (1967) and now The Golden Age ...”

“... Ashmanskas, who is mostly known for his theatre acting, gives a pleasingly fruity rendition of Gore Vidal – one of the couple’s closest friends – and speaks the lines that give the documentary its title. Vidal observed that Woodward and Newman ‘presided over the end of the movies as the universal art ...”

“... methods and messages are diverse and individual, he settles down to record them, beginning with Gore Vidal and ending with Jean Genet. His manner is to give detailed and surprisingly readable accounts of the plots of an author’s salient novels, sprinkling these accounts with sharp comments as to the thought or motive that may have lain behind such ...”

“... Creation is a novel that describes, creates and analyses history, and it is not the first of Gore Vidal’s novels to do so. He has already devoted a lengthy trilogy to American history, and Julian, though set some eight hundred years later than Creation, shares the new novel’s concern with history both political and religious in the ancient world ...”

“... in the world-power game puffing itself up like an elephant seal to fight for its colonies? Gore Vidal once said that England should become one of the ‘lands’ and understand its geographical and political place in the world: Iceland, Newfoundland, Greenland, England. If that’s too hard to bear, we could at least look to Scandinavia (does the ...”

“... and positively Asiatic in manner. He, on the other hand, is brief and relatively Attic (‘Vidal’s looks, in common with everything else about Vidal, are dear to Vidal’s heart’). These differences in length and manner may have something to do with the exiguous spaces in which ...”

“... only character but forceful personalities. They are irritable, embarrassable, funny and ingenious. Gore Vidal has remarked that they are exactly like adults, ‘except for one difference. In a well-ordered and stable society (England in the time of the gross Edward), children are as clearly defined a minority group as Jews and Negroes in other times and ...”

“... fool of oneself in a speech before Vietnam protesters at the Pentagon march or losing to the Gore Vidal/Janet Flanner tandem on the Dick Cavett show. This self-centred writer – who returned to public prominence after a bad Fifties by publishing a collection entitled Advertisements for Myself (1959) – has chosen for this anthology the most ...”

“... not to see a play but to enjoy what was meant to be a thrilling contest between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The place was packed; except for those sponsored by some publisher, the audience had bought very expensive tickets, and they displayed a keenness more appropriate to a prizefight. Indeed a prizefight was what they expected, Mailer and ...”

“... of the Caesar’, which stars Helen Mirren, done up à la Fellini-Rome, and ends with Gore Vidal promising that this extravaganza is ‘coming soon to a theatre near you’. Also pervasive here as elsewhere are the large painterly photograph and the even larger projected image, both of which are often treated digitally. These formats have ...”

“... school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style couldn’t fail ...”

“... believe it. His contemporary evidence for hype’s ‘essentially American origins’ is based on Gore Vidal; it hardly seems to square with what has gone before. Vidal explains what was apparently long a well-known American defect – difficulty in making conversation – by going back to Frontier days, when ‘it was ...”

“... examples, demonstrating that Ephron was the world’s worst writer, even worse than Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal and Renata Adler. A few years later, I would understand the hatred when Ephron wrote a very funny account (‘The Legend’) of her mother throwing Lillian out of a party.Great reporting isn’t usually harmed by the reporter having a poor ...”

“... Manhattan apartment into a hotel: Bloom flies to Rome and takes dubious solace in the company of Gore Vidal). Then there are the fascinating financial particulars. Nothing suggests more piquantly the delicate Oedipal relations between Roth, Bloom and Bloom’s teenage daughter Anna (by former husband Rod Steiger), than the incident in which Roth ...”