SOURCE: “When the Saints Go Marching In Again,” in The Spectator, October 10, 1992, pp. 32-3.

In the following review of Live from Golgotha, Moore concludes that the novel reveals “surprising comic energy” despite its “silly” premise and “puerile” humor.

Live from Golgotha is like an amalgam of Life of Brian with Star Trek—one of those ‘time-warp’ episodes when characters keep bumping into their past and future selves, and their mission (usually to save the Universe, or prevent History from being rewritten) keeps getting bogged down by the scriptwriters’ need to decide and explain quite what physical and temporal laws govern this week’s instalment. Gore Vidal’s novel is part blasphemously comic rewrite of the Acts of the Apostles, part frenetic science-fiction, complete with ‘tele-time transportation’ and its full quota of bemused questioning (‘Why didn’t you stop your younger self the same way that you stopped him...