“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Geodetic Survey, America’s first scientific agency, for which his own father had been a clerk. Gore Vidal, also a creature of Washington, claimed he’d grown up hearing that Hoover ‘came from a family that passed’. Beverly Gage writes in her new biography that it’s possible some of Hoover’s ancestors were Black – they had lived in places ...”

“... thirty seconds he disappears completely.In a 1993 essay, ‘How We Missed the Saturday Dance’, Gore Vidal revealed that his own special Rosebud, a personal mnemonic for loss in general and one particular person lost to the Second World War, was the old standard ‘Don’t Get around Much Anymore’. There’s a clue here to how it is that a lot of ...”

“... devotion to home and family. Speaking in Breaking Ranks with an archness more characteristic of Gore Vidal, he remarks of Mailer and Brown that ‘whole centuries marched through their pages and gigantic generalisations were made; nothing small was here.’ And when Mailer offered examples of some of these generalisations, the results for Podhoretz ...”

“... convertible in New York is not a sofa-bed as advertised, but a man who goes either way – what Gore Vidal now calls a bisexual. A final irony is that the heart of the homosexual world is in San Francisco and is called Castro Street. Gay, yes, but with a vengeance. Pinera the Pederast got out of gaol, thanks to the intervention of Edith Buchaca, not ...”