Contemporary Literary Criticism | Vidal, Gore (Vol. 142) - Bevis Hillier (review date 14 October 1995)

Bevis Hillier (review date 14 October 1995)

SOURCE: “He Has Not Lived in Vain,” in The Spectator, October 14, 1995, pp. 39-40.

[In the following review, Hillier offers a positive evaluation of Palimpsest.]

Even when Peter Cook was alive, Gore Vidal was the person I most enjoyed seeing interviewed on television. Not since Evelyn Waugh’s Face to Face with John Freeman has anybody swatted interrogators or hostile panellists more effortlessly, more lethally. Alan Bennett gives a classic example in Writing Home, describing a radio programme of 1984:

Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard [Watership Down] Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal’s new novel about Lincoln. ‘I thought it was meretricious.’ ‘Really?’ says Gore. ‘Well, meretricious and a happy new year.’ That’s the way to do it.

It sure is. Vidal, who has...

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