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Vidal, Gore

United States: Essays 1952–1992, [29] 62; Julian, [45] 36

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The Fatal Gift of Phrase

Michael Barber on Gore Vidal, United States: Essays, 1952–1992 and Palimpsest

In the age of the common man, said Malcolm Muggeridge, we all want to be uncommon, and they don’t come more uncommon than Gore Vidal, a writer for whom the term sui generis might have been coined. Quickened by a sense of mischief and a sense of justice, Vidal has been a thorn in the side of the American Establishment for more than sixty years. Pithy, trenchant, a lifelong enemy of cant, he is the embodiment, over there, of what Sir Maurice Bowra called the Immoral Front – subversives whose aim is to question everything and respect nothing.
20150301103559 Patrick Welland on Gore Vidal, Julian

Last of the Pagans

Patrick Welland on Gore Vidal, Julian

Vidal explores this confrontation between old and new in a fictive autobiography drawing on three surviving volumes of Julian’s letters and essays, and contemporary recollections. In doing so, he paints a sympathetic portrait of an individual gullible and pragmatic, sensitive and stubborn. Julian was a skilful military commander, a talented administrator and a concerned social reformer. But he was driven by contempt for Christians who he saw bowing to an authority they regarded as greater than Rome. He mocked them as Galileans, and their churches packed with relics he called charnel houses.

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