“... 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 ...”

“... modest, so got under the skin of intellectuals in the Eighties. He was definitively despatched by Gore Vidal some long while ago. Conor Cruise O’Brien then took his furious turn at the coconut shy. And here is Hitchens, lobbing adjectives like grenades in the same cause. It’s all too much. One can’t easily imagine anyone wasting so much ink and ...”

“... by the militarists and super-patriots) and that issues in our own day in the work of Edward Said, Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky. In that chain, Macdonald forms an important link. And he was enabled by his reading and experience to draw, not just on the native tradition of philosophical anarchism, but also on the more tensile analyses of the Moloch ...”

“... writes with such consistent wit and intelligence: I would place him as an essayist second only to Gore Vidal among those now writing. And perhaps he has given us the key to his own evolution in the title essay on Yeats: ‘The politics of the left – any left, even a popular ‘National Movement’ – impose by their emphasis on collective effort and ...”

“... at ‘characters’ in this book: its true star is Calvino’s descriptive prose. Others (well, Gore Vidal, anyway) have called this Calvino’s ‘most beautiful work’, and perhaps it is. But it’s an oppressive and finally cloying beauty, all those jewelled sentences and glittering notions and no story-telling worth a damn. You will notice I’m ...”

“... more than a (sadly) fashionably anti-pc complaint about the loss of straight white-male privilege. Gore Vidal, who’s had his dick sucked more than a few times and been taken to task for it, has written far more persuasively that the novel as an art-form has become a cultural irrelevance, but you don’t hear him whingeing about ‘artistic ...”

“... early as the Forties, before he became ashamed of that too). He was also terrified of being black. Gore Vidal has a distinct recollection of a tarbrush rumour about Hoover’s family that extended back at least to the Depression. ‘People said he came from a family that had “passed”. It was the word they used for people of black origin who, after ...”

“... to amplifying and complicating them to the point of obstruction – the kind of argument which, as Gore Vidal once put it, gives intellectual dishonesty a bad name.Let me conclude​ with a simple but realistic case. Parkinson’s disease slowly erodes first the body, frequently the mind. It does not kill: as the neurologist will reassure the patient, you ...”

“... which it’s hard not to see as an act of self-immolation. He ‘mined his own monument’, Gore Vidal observed, ‘and blew it ...”

“... of prose, and after the Second World War, every male contender – William Styron, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Jones, Joseph Heller – had done some service and wanted to write literary masterpieces filled with the perfumes of combat.* It is only in more recent times that the task of writing novels about battle has fallen chiefly to bad writers. It ...”

“... his father’s biographer.) The book is full of good humour, of the ‘gossip and jokes’ which Gore Vidal once convincingly said were the things for which people read memoirs. Experience is full of a lovely warmth about Amis’s mother (‘There were many reasons why my mother loved living in Spain, not the least of them being that you could, in most ...”

“... alarm for his health that he thought he was going to die, and even wanted to die. He told Gore Vidal that he slept through the whole of the 1960s. ‘You didn’t miss a thing,’ Vidal told him. But even during his lost decade it seems evident that Williams sat down every day at his desk. ‘My life seems to ...”

“... the exploding confetti and frantic wrist action of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (all three published in one wigging-out year).Couples was sexually explicit but morally serious, psychologically astute and starkly pore-examining, a John Cassavetes ensemble transplanted to a troubled patch of paradise ...”

“... commissioned by him to do some of his best work there – pieces which later turned into books. Gore Vidal, also an admirer of Wyndham, was a frequent contributor. Bruce Chatwin was persuaded by him to begin his career as a writer on the Magazine. Others, it should be said, like Norman Lewis, were not his protégés. The standard was high. We were ...”

“... in 1987: ‘I have been standing for PEACE and MR GORBACHEV with Gregory Peck and Yoko Ono and Gore Vidal and Fay Weldon. Where were you?!’ 26 September. And as I am correcting the proofs of this piece comes the death of my next-door neighbour, the publisher Colin Haycraft. He was like Lindsay A. in many ways, standing at the same ironic angle to ...”