EVERY TIME A FRIEND SUCCEEDS, SOMETHING INSIDE ME DIES

(Abacus £10.99)

‘I WISH,’ remarked one of Gore Vidal’s teachers, ‘that I were a bull. Then I could gore Vidal.’

It was a sentiment Gore would inspire throughout his life — shared by his fellow writers Truman Capote and Norman Mailer (with whom he got into a punch-up at a glamorous New York party) and the right-wing polemicist William F. Buckley.

Vidal’s latest biographer, the academic and novelist Jay Parini, met the writer in the Eighties in Italy.

‘I was looking for a father, and he seemed in search of a son,’ Parini writes — perhaps overstating the intimacy of their relationship, which seemed to consist mainly of his taking notes while the great narcissist of American letters pontificated.

But nobody could pontificate more entertainingly than Vidal, and this biography, filled with glittering names and acerbic wit, faithfully evokes the dangerous charm whose chilly dazzle even his melancholy last years could not quite extinguish.