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“... heavy jowls into a glumly expressive set of male genitalia. Nixon’s personality was even richer. Gore Vidal parodied him in his 1960 play The Best Man and, beginning in the late 1960s, an impressive roster of American writers, including Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth and Garry Wills ...”

“... found himself a boldface gossip column item. Norman Mailer might crackle before the TV cameras, Gore Vidal might manicure his aperçus and Truman Capote flick his malice, but Roth had no desire to hop on the carousel horse.Post-Portnoy, he mastered the art of emerging and receding from the media spotlight, surfacing when he had a squalling new novel to ...”

“... with some willing to see it as the ‘ultimate ironic burlesque of Swedish parochialism’. Gore Vidal once remarked that literary life in London was ‘worse than Oslo’. The Messiah of Stockholm gives some idea of what that might be really like. But although Lars works in this milieu of stifling second-rateness, he does not really belong to ...”

“... is an interview in which she says that the idea held by ‘some American intellectuals like [Gore] Vidal and many bien-pensant intellectuals in Europe – that America has brought this horror upon itself, that America itself is, in part, to blame for the deaths of these thousands upon its own territory – is not, I ...”

“... the narrator of London Fields, in interstitial chapters filled with writing advice and ‘what Gore Vidal used to call “book chat”’. The advice is enjoyably pontifical about such matters as the ‘sonic charge’ of prepositions: ‘of’, ‘to’ and ‘with’ are innocuous, but ‘up’ shouldn’t be reused until ‘two or three hundred ...”

“... to burn. Among postwar writers, Sontag was not alone in possessing glossy sex appeal. The young Gore Vidal boasted matinee-idol looks, Truman Capote beheld the camera like a debauched cherub on the back jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms, and Joan Didion, posed against a Corvette Stingray in a long stately dress and sandals, was a chic postcard for ...”

“... go on writing, not only ‘stiffly superior to and scornful of professors, in the manner of Gore Vidal’, but also in other manners, and in some cases not ‘stiffly superior’ but simply indifferent to or unconscious of professors, an idea that doesn’t seem to enter the minds of some academics as being within the realm of possibility, and ...”

“... well as his fiction. ‘If you get a letter from Paul, it’s about what he had for breakfast,’ Gore Vidal once complained. Bowles more or less agrees: I can’t believe I ever wrote an ‘interesting’ letter. It seems to me a good letter has to have the smell of the personality of the one who writes it. And I think my eagerness to avoid leaving any ...”

“... lay in state nor can he remember the venue (‘some pub in Fleet Street’) where he was to meet Gore Vidal. Probably it had been so with us had we been there, but we might not have thought it necessary to say so, especially if, like Gordon himself, we had not in the event bothered to visit the funeral parlour or actually speak to the live ...”

“... Colony Room Club or (is it still there?) the Toucan in Gerrard Street. I still wish that Gore Vidal had had his way with Hugh Gaitskell, and got Tom appointed or at least nominated for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury. It would please old Tom, he argued at A.J. Ayer’s dinner table, and might help to extinguish Christianity in England. Tom ...”

“... is never quite boring – what it is, really, is a phantom novel, a palimpsest, to borrow the term Gore Vidal used for his recent memoirs. Vidal’s palimpsest, however, was a metaphorical conceit: Roth has created the genuine article – a slather of words designed to mask the far more troubling story they ...”

“... or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges.’ This impatience with literary artefacts means that he and Camilla are also veteran walkers-out at the theatre. ‘Before ten minutes of the first scene had elapsed we were up out of our ...”

“... is something that American authors are particularly good at; he has written about the enmity of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, and now cites Berryman’s unease at Lowell’s pre-eminence (‘Who’s number one? Who’s number one?’). But how does this relate to The Information? Richard writes Joycean novels on a scale of difficulty that would make ...”

“... 1994, Rick Moody seemed to be looking for a workable compromise between suburban realism and what Gore Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural ...”

“... lighten the point with self-deflating comedy: ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,’ Gore Vidal said, channelling a similar joke by Oscar Wilde. But La Rochefoucauld is in grim earnest, and Swift plays the translation straight. He restores the comic deficit in the poem itself, a mock obituary projected into the voices of his friends and ...”