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“... him a blank canvas on which to develop the themes that preoccupied him. One of the attractions for Gore Vidal of Julian the Apostate as the subject of a novel was the slenderness of the documentary evidence as late as the 1960s. Anyone with internet access can acquire in a minute or two the smattering of expertise that would once have taken hours in a ...”

“... nine years before the Stonewall Inn protest. It was also risky, given the neglect and criticism Gore Vidal and James Baldwin suffered after publishing their gay novels, The City and the Pillar (1948) and Giovanni’s Room (1956).’ But Purdy’s method is anything but confrontational, using elderly Alma Mason as the point of view. Alma’s nephew ...”

“... calling his debut Doings and Undoings. The columnist Michael Kinsley once observed that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, and Podhoretz was an old critic’s version of a young critic, publishing in the proper publications and bemoaning hairy barbarians like the Beats (‘The Know-Nothing Bohemians’, included in Doings and ...”

“... Russell and Simone de Beauvoir all wrote for Vogue under her editorship and she ran features on Gore Vidal, Isherwood, Bacon, Freud and Matisse. She employed Elizabeth David to write on food. And she was a socialist. Her serious-mindedness gave Vogue the gravitas it needed during the war. She wrote to Nast in 1940: ‘We try to look at each sentence ...”

“... if any serious contender for that title between about 1930 and 1980 were more prolific than VSP. Gore Vidal, always a master of understated hyperbole, praised Pritchett’s criticism by saying ‘it would be nice if Sir Victor lived for ever.’ Pritchett did his best: he was born in 1900, when Victoria was still queen, and he died little more than a ...”

“... goes when the plots of modernism become familiar, conventional and boring. Plays are not prose, Gore Vidal observed; and to be sure, dialogue in the novel is not yet drama. But Beckett’s plays (and maybe even his novels) come out of a private kind of dialogue (or monologue); and his period, the breakdown of the modern, was certainly also a glorious ...”

“... in Congressional ‘debates’; elections are a drawn-out catchpenny charade invariably won, as Gore Vidal points out, by the abstainers; the political idiom is a consensual form (‘healing process’, ‘bipartisan’, ‘dialogue’) of langue de bois and the pundits are of a greyness and mediocrity better passed over than described. Periodic ...”

“... priding himself on letting Philip eat the tops, readers these days are more likely to agree with Gore Vidal, who called it the novel in which Maugham’s lifelong self-pity came ‘to a full rather ghastly flowering’. Philip’s agonised pursuit of Mildred – a green-skinned waitress who holds her knife like a pen, calls him a cripple, and, in ...”

“... their manners, their speech and prose style, Trilling and Levin have lost their Jewishness. As Gore Vidal once put it, and with a wit that protects him from the worst of Bellow’s self-torture: it isn’t enough to succeed, others must fail. Especially when the others are friends, relatives, anyone with whom there are reasons to feel closely ...”

“... gives them a shilling so they won’t tell about it.’ In publishing these stories Bowles joined Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin as one of the pioneers of gay fiction in America. Williams read ‘The Delicate Prey’ while accompanying Bowles to Tangier on the SS Vulcania in December 1948. ‘It was a stormy crossing, and I stayed in my ...”

“... that Carey detests in his own university.Huxley died on the same day as JFK: bad career move, as Gore Vidal might say. Thirty-eight years on, he has nonetheless survived better than his fiction or his ‘philosophical writing’ warrant. Two books above all have kept his posthumous reputation buoyant. Brave New World (1932) is, on the face of it, as ...”

“... still saved us, and the world. ‘Although I’ve never taken Updike seriously as a writer,’ Gore Vidal wrote in 1996, ‘I now find him the unexpectedly relevant laureate of the way we would like to live now, if we have the money, the credentials and the sort of faith in our country and its big God that passes all understanding.’ Rabbit’s ...”

“... remain monogamous (and heterosexual) for almost 20 years, he noticed a change coming. When he saw Gore Vidal on TV in the early 1960s he thought him ‘personable and intelligent’ and then wrote: ‘I think that he is either not a fairy or that perhaps we have reached a point where men of this persuasion are not forced into attitudes of ...”

“... dazzle. Where some of his contemporaries went gonzo (Norman Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam?), camp (Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge) or ejaculatory amok (Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint), Bellow bore down on civilisation and its discontents with the full gravitas of his brow. The successor to Herzog was Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970), a distraught elegy and ...”

“... I thought you were incredible.’Suddenly, Last Summer (the script is by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal) is a stagey picture with a gothic plot in which Taylor’s aunt, played by Katharine Hepburn, tries to have her lobotomised to prevent her from revealing that her late son, Sebastian, was homosexual. It features a 27-year-old Taylor as Catherine ...”