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“... ecclesiastical offices of the New York Times – unroll in the pensive, slightly irked manner of Gore Vidal expounding on the verandah, taking inventory of civilisation’s rapid cookie crumble. For all his purported solipsism, Ellis has proved to be a skilful interviewer as well, with a varied roster of guests including the directors Walter Hill and ...”

“... lurid. The most famous is the 1979 movie, funded by Bob Guccione and Penthouse, with a script by Gore Vidal. It starred Malcolm McDowell as a convincingly bonkers young emperor, backed up by a group of A-list actors, including Gielgud and Helen Mirren, who were said to have been unaware of the soft porn enterprise in which they were involved. (Did they ...”

“... of his language. To Harold Bloom, Updike is ‘a minor writer with a major style’. Gore Vidal thinks that Updike ‘describes to no purpose’. James Wood complains that Updike fills his characters’ thoughts with showy phrases that don’t suit them or their situations; and that the ‘very pretty ribbons’ of Updike’s style are a ...”

“... opposition to American imperialism is sustained chiefly through such US exports as Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Michael Moore. But although his recent examples come from the war on terror, the political development they represent is not, according to Agamben, peculiar to the United States under the Bush presidency. It is part of a wider change in ...”

“... Starring Fast Planes, Bikes and Women’, the much derided Playboy advertises a long piece by Gore Vidal on God and the state. Jack runs a piece about British wrestling in which even the writer seems completely bored with the subject: I ask Keith to tell me the difference between the British wrestler and the new breed of Americans who seem to have ...”

“... affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of ...”

“... with eight or so concerned onlookers (some of them, like Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Gore Vidal, younger candidates for sagedom) are cut and rearranged to give a chronological sense of each career, but also a whiff of the blood and cordite of intellectual warfare. The purpose is not quite literary biography or portraiture, for which a more ...”

“... resist the idea, Miss Didion’s talent is primarily discursive in tendency. As is the case with Gore Vidal, the essays are far more interesting than the fiction. The novels get taken up, with the enthusiasm, the unanimity, the relief which American critics and readers often show when they discover a new and distinctly OK writer. Miss Didion is already ...”

“... this thanks to the constant backing of the United States, whose support is the consequence of what Gore Vidal in his gem of a Preface to Shahak’s book describes as ‘the serene corruption of American polities’. As Armstrong fairly says, the Israelis have not been the worst conquerors of Jerusalem. That distinction belongs to the Crusaders, who ...”

“... door), and there was freedom in being reachable only by letter (phones were for dramatic events). Gore Vidal said Bouvier lost her virginity in a lift to a writer for the Paris Review, someone else said she went out with an assistant to the prime minister, who took her riding in the Bois de Boulogne. We can’t know more until Bouvier’s papers are ...”

“... office politics). In America, the writers who went off to war were younger, apprentice meteors. Gore Vidal wrote a small, cool, personal book in Williwaw; Norman Mailer attempted in The Naked and the Dead to write the Big Novel about the war and ended up writing a kind of pastiche, a strange hybrid of modernist ambition and postmodernist decentredness ...”

“... tightrope-walking artists – comedians, gymnasts, racing drivers, and cultural commentators like Gore Vidal) rather than in high art. Modernism has ruined high art for him, largely because it has abandoned its appeal to popular recognition in favour of a kind of self-sealing historicism. But he cannot quite keep his categories watertight. His love of ...”

“... his sponsorship lapse when the same outfit published hysterical slanders against Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. In the argument about standardised courses in ‘Western Civilisation’, he intervened with the now notorious remark that the Papuans had no Proust and the Zulus had no … was it Zola? He wrote a crabbed and resentful account of a visit to the ...”

“... at Groucho’s in the company of (or at least in the same room as) Melvyn Bragg, Umberto Eco and Gore Vidal. Amnesia has gone away and names are being profusely dropped again. Bradbury has never had much luck with the Booker, and I would guess that he’s blown it for 1992. But what is intriguing about the description of Booker 1990 is how lavish he is ...”

“... drama of many postwar Anglophone writers. Global celebrity arrived in 1974 with an appreciation by Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books. Critics murmured about a Nobel. Ten years later Calvino died of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 61, while completing the texts for his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. Only five of the six lectures were ...”