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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 shaken hands with Gide, who shook hands with Wilde, is one of the few...
This section contains 2,066 words (approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page) |
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