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“... and without interruption now and then from sceptical oldies like Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, the tale of Edie might easily have drooled off into a dreary catalogue of hippy-scene excess. As it is, the book shrewdly keeps the straight world in its sights: a nicely judged mix of the titillating and the admonitory. After Edie, I am ...”

“... ROBERT FITZDALE: His lies were better than other people’s truths. Much more interesting. GORE VIDAL: There are different sorts of liars … Capote’s lies had a double purpose: one was to attract attention to himself and to distract attention from what he looked and sounded like. Second, ultimately they were calculated to destroy other people ...”

“... and he was spoiling for a fight. What is it with these New York lit-celebs? A year or two ago, Gore Vidal published a book-length essay of complaint in the Spectator after his new volume of essays had been underhailed by the London reviewers. Again, I was named among the guilty men and Vidal’s tone, like ...”

“... highbrow novelist – not in the sense that, say, Saul Bellow might believe himself to be, or even Gore Vidal. Vidal, all too predictably, sneers at Updike as a middlebrow provincial, by which he seems to mean that Updike timorously fails to stride forward as a global sage, or as a ‘custodian’ of threatened highbrow ...”

“... and psyche. A few weeks ago, in an earnest pre-Booker debate about the status of modern fiction, Gore Vidal tried to break up the Martin-Melvyn axis of self-importance by bringing up the subject of Auster – ‘a youngish writer’ – as an example of writing talent that is selling out to celluloid. Film, ...”

“... The Joy of Cooking constituted the library. As a boy, I became acquainted with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Truman Capote as talk-show guests. The TV screen was their boxing-ring. Literally so, on occasion, for Mailer, who had studied his Hemingway. Vidal was the sophisticate – dry, erudite, condescending to an ...”

“... has always been fascinated by the great world of politics and money. While other writers – Gore Vidal, let’s say – look on this world with a mixture of envy and disgust, it is obvious that Bellow loves to get up close to the sources of power and feel the glow on his face and see the sparks fly. If he is part social philosopher who knows his ...”

“... Chat-win, laid up with jaundice outside Padua and longing for company, but no more. There is also Gore Vidal (‘unobtainable’) and the diplomat, Fred Warner, who declines her proposal of marriage on the grounds that he’s ‘far too queer’. Her mistake, Tennant now sees, was ‘to imagine that hatred will best be found in homosexual men, when the ...”

“... his second. Hughdie’s second wife, Nina, came armed with a ten-year-old son, known to us all as Gore Vidal. Vidal would have much to say about his stepfather. Hughdie was, Vidal said, ‘a magnum of chloroform’. He also owned an estate in Virginia, a farm and a mansion at Newport ...”

“... policy of the United States – surely a difficult feat. One does not have to go all the way with Gore Vidal and think that ‘irrelevance is now the American condition, both as a global empire and an incoherent domestic polity.’ Yet America acts abroad, the columnist William Pfaff recently wrote, according to ‘what corporate interests and electoral ...”

“... imperial corruption has lasted, in a line of pessimistic historicism that runs from Henry Adams to Gore Vidal. Other American borrowings from the Roman heritage look more trivial, even comical, in retrospect, like the statuary of tobacco-chewing frontier Jacksonian politicians dressed in togas. But even these reveal something about American ...”

“... American soil. Were the Lees descended from Robert E. Lee? Was there Jewish blood in the line (as Gore Vidal has mischievously suggested)? Did the Bouviers come from the French nobility? The answer in all cases would seem to be no – just another generational leap from striving petit-bourgeois to finance capital – but an immense amount of worry about ...”

“... battery and certainly some come-uppance reviews) by burlesquing such mandarins as Alfred Kazin, Gore Vidal, Benjamin de Mott and – at inordinate length – George Steiner in the New Yorker (a bite at the hand which has, most famously, fed Updike): ‘An occasion to marvel once again that not since the Periclean Greeks has there been a configuration ...”

“... didn’t have the sense to take the guts out of a chicken before she cooked it. How did she, as Gore Vidal remarked, ‘get entirely within the event told’? (Vidal disliked her personally, but was one of the few contemporaries who wrote about her with any perspicacity at all.) The gestures in her fiction are ...”

“... at Santa Barbara. There are some good gags and gossip, particularly when Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal hit Hollywood: ‘Yesterday, there was a big party for Tennessee at the Duquettes’. Mary Pickford was there, stoned, and Edwina, Tennessee’s mother, said to her: “Do you remember your long yellow curls?” ...”