Gore Vidal in conversation with Melvyn Bragg 

Gore Vidal, as your last year 2012 comes to an end, the New Year will be a little darker without you. I miss you, the world will miss you. It was a better place with your logic and straight talking. - Nobody else can compare, or even come close, to your ability, wealth of knowledge, wit and experience, you are an irreplaceable loss. R.I.P.

It's so outrageous that every interviewer asks Vidal the same questions. It's such a pity. Vidal was such an extremely intelligent and interersting man and more than that: Vidal was an iconoclast. In this age where everything is "iconic" Vidal was smashing icons - we need him back.

I saw him at a festival around the same time, interviewed by Andrew Marr whose weedy interview technique he simply batted out of the way and got on with what he wanted to say. This was a very old man; how many people criticising him will have half his wits in the unlikely event of their surviving into their 80s? Of course the anecdotes are well-worn by now and the second volume of his autobiography is the work of a tired and unwell man, but read "Palimpsest" if you want an insight into his extraordinary life. His fiction has seldom grabbed me but the essays and criticism remain the best testament to his talent. An honest man in the City on the Plain.

Imagine... even in advanced old age, he was still the smartest, most informed, wittiest and most articulate man in the room. And if some of his prognostications were dark- look at us now.

My intellectual hero. Thanks for posting.

Great to see the master at work

Have heard Gore do a lot of impressions, but never expected him to mimic Buckley.

I love how Melvynn Bragg asks Vidal about himseld and Vidal goes into the war in Iraq and education.

Gore Vidal changed my view of history along with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky I will love them tell my last day in this world.

He said both party's are the same, 40 years ago!!!!!! Not even today do prominent people repeat that truth.

Also very talented and gifted in voices.....a brilliant imitator

One thing's for sure, the old man has an international-standard ability to grab the attention by the balls and hold it prone with nothing more than well placed language and the kind of gentle, grandfatherly gravitas earned through decades of experience at the highest levels of intellect.

this discussion could be a template for understanding wisdom, without the forceful direction.

Loving this man's perspective.

i so miss our midnight walks down by the lake...may ur spirit thrive up yonder on the special cloud for men of wit and class...

"Well, he's not gonna like hell" America, now more than ever, needs more young people to step up and carry his torch!!!

Thankyou for uploading this. Any Gore is absolute gold, nevermind Gore being interviewed by Melvin Bragg.

Vidal was brilliant he was right about lying it’s pure evil and causes untold misery

thanks so much for this upload. He was old and infirm but at his sententious best. The way his weltanschauung revealed itself in short sentences was almost breathtaking.

He was quite amazing . A good writer as well ...

i had a friend who knew vidal in italy...he told me gore would enter sit in HIS chair and proceed to hold court

Can you just imagine how horrified he would be in 2021!!

" I guess I'm not looking at it" at the 54:00 mark... ha ha! He has a remarkable sense of humor.

If only he was around now, my god what would he think?

Gore Vidal was and is the greatest historian dramatist political commentator and critic.

He was brilliant.

I've tended to think of Gore Vidal in conjunction with William F Buckley, both verbal masters but different in how they applied words. Buckley trotted out words as ornaments. Vidal used words to speak.

We still use mercenaries. So embarrassing what America really is.

0:50:20 - Q & A 0:51:35 - Q1 : 0:53:20 - 0:53:48 - Q2 : 0:54:56 - Q3 : 0:55:23 - Q4 : 0:56:22 - Q5 : 0:58:09 - Q6 : 0:59:29 - Q7 : 1:00:28 - Q8 : 1:02:48 - 1:04:08 - Q9 : 1:06:11 - Q10 : 1:08:22 - Q11 : 1:09:17 - Q12 : 1:10:00 - Q13 : 1:11:04 - 1:11:56 - Q14 : no mic 1:13:49 - Q15 : 1:15:15 - Q16 : 1:16:46 - Q17 : 1:18:00 - Thank you very much, indeed.

Hes less than one in a million... I don't think there are more than 7,000 people like him in the world.

This man takes 5 minutes to answer a simple question and every second of every minute of it is entertaining. A true intellectual.

He is a wonderful man. Sad that he is aging. They are startiing to destroy his writings and memory.

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That mankind does not learn very well from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." - Aldous Huxley -

This is priceless. Gold. Wonderful stuff.

mr vidal ur an absolute darling!

He was a patriot (not a populist nationalist).......

What an absolutely wonderful talk.

Sorely missed in today’s USA 🇺🇸 a skeptic, an historian, an anti-war advocate, an anti-Israel American but sad to say having little or none at all faith! ♥️✝️♥️

"Lies will damage your immortal soul"

"Never underestimate white guilt". "We found other ways to enslave people".... I wish I could remember every word he says....

Gore is witty, brilliant, funny and quite the raconteur. He is the supreme speaker. Honest, candid and outspoken, fearless. Literary giant. When asked why he left the United States to live in Italy, he replied: "Americans live in constant guilt and fear and he wanted no part of it." God bless him. I miss him terribly. Thank you for posting this extraordinary episode.

Good thing he did not live to see Trump.

great clarity

No More War

Always great to hear GV, but how did MB get away with it all these years?

it is hard to hear. whre are the microphones~?~

vidal is brilliant here...intent on cutting right to the point....with nothing but truth....the interviewer does his part...keeping gore away from the simple and easy laughs

One of the best conversations, If not the best ever. As time passes and ignorance sweeps this country, what do we do??????? We can now understand what civilizations thought as the dark ages have sweep across the land. We maybe heading for the second dark ages. This was the fear that this man felt in his last days. How sad of state we find our country.

Who could forget Bierce?

On his Selective Essays for students and his historical book War on México: 1:11:55 💛

Anybody viewing this in May 2020 (Covid-19)

I had to read gore vidal's Julian novel in college western civ. It was pretty awesome, the first third that I got thru, at least.

Totally fascinating, his sharp mind is contagious.

reading one of his autobiographys....awesome

An American actor should adapt this as a One Man Show for theatre, and take it on national tour: Gore Vidal sharing his thoughts about America. Perhaps the show could use a little bit of 'poetic licence' and speculate on what Vidal might have said about Trump's presidency.

To me it seemed like a reaction to dull and loaded questions. I do think he lost a certain fire about him, and wasn't so easily piqued, I would attribute that to some of his more bland answers rather than mental decline.

Fantastic and admirable!

My God what would he make of the current monstrosity in the White House

Would it be to much to expect that the audio people have any audio problems sorted out and rectified before the program commences, precisely to avoid the unpleasant squeals and grunts audible at the start of this event? Not to have the audio working perfectly seems to me to be an insult to the two formidable intellects here.

Geniius

His disgust for liars must have him spinning in his grave in the age of trump.

I bought a ticket for this event, then bought train tickets. Then on the day i went to the train station I realised that the even occured the day previously and I had bought train tickets for the wrong day. I still went to London, but was devastated I never got to see the man.

My god, this man put on so much. He had this perfect transatlantic accent in the 60's. Fast forwarded to a 2002 video of him and he had lost that accent. Now here he has tried to adopt an old world English accent. What was with this man and accents?

Wow - Vidal is really speaking to us today ... he wld have been SCATHING @ Trump and Americans having elected him...

Gore's sexuality was ambidexterous?!? There goes any consolation I awarded myself when thinking of my own hetero conquest scorecard! I heard him remark that the person he loved most was not his partner he died with (who also spent the most years 'with' him.) Hitchens also remarks in his book "Hitch 22" that Gore was notorious for denying his counterpart in sex any pleasure. His ability to utilize mystique equiponderate to confrontation I believe did wonders for his writing and sex life.

I love Gore.

He's a one off. Hilarious. Who willreplace him? Jordan?

An intellectual American, which he was and a shining icon etched in the American literary history. Today when we say intellectual American, one feels strangely uncomfortable, as if, he has uttered an oxymoronic expression. Times changed

HE said nobody did anything for vets? Didn't lincoln dish out a bunch of veterans' pensions?

It's necessary to acknowledge the concept of the perceptions and labels in terms of "god", but remain agnostic in the conception of Actuality, and without anthropomorphic projections.

I miss Mr Vidal; it seems I grew up watching him on television.

This wisdom has gone forever. No guts no more.

Look up H L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock if you liked Gore Vidal...

Bragg's retorts on the religion argument were pathetic deflection, Vidal is beyond him in so many ways here.

Thank you, Gore Vidal...

This Man was a treasure. American intelligence is in decline with every passing of the few

The sound needs improvement. Is to low!

Bragg the Establishment lackey can't hold Vidal back .

People cough when he's on to something

I heard someone say one time that he had spent most of his life dealing with an irrational fear of being gored to death by a bull. But that fear had now changed to being bulled to death by a gore.

How nervous was Bragg.. I mean he's an intelligent chap but he's very much realised the true eminence present

Thats it Gore Vidal is on my Xmas list!!

Yes. After a couple of sentences he gets back to the same topics.

What a loss. Does anyone know of anyone in 2021 that's as open, logical, informative as Gore Vidal? Let's say, a successor if you will.

31:10 gore is right here

We need more men (and) women of this type of intellect and humour ...

Don't rest in peace, Gore. Make the welkin ring with cakes and ale. Let the cherubim and seraphim enjoy the off-the-cuff flashes of your jeu d'esprit.

36:31-39:03 ...

The Vidals come from Catalunya

All of us get old. And if people want to pay you to keep speaking, then you go. I saw him in 2003 at Harvard Univ. He was brilliant as always but was over weight and had trouble walking. He lasted almost 10 more yrs after that. He outlived Mailer & Buckley. (a good thing for the last word) He was very critical of JFK, RFK and Bill Clinton for that matter but I still admire him greatly becasue he didn't "pull punches"

The RGS couldn't afford a competent audio engineer?

His liking Hilary is very strange since she is a complete self server on the side of Wall Street. The Third Way personified.

True Genius!

Speaking truth to a one time Republic that became Empire and wears no clothes

Wonder what he would say about the Trump hatred

Was he at the stage of "wet brain" where he claimed there were Somali pirates in his pool?

"We've become a country of lies. Everyone knows it and the politicians know we know but they don't care." America hasn't changed course since this discussion.

Gore... When asked about GW Bush he replied 'You don't need Freud when you're dealing with Caligula'. What would he think about Boris Johnson or Trump? Not much.

I love Gore Vidal, but I thought his assessment of John F. Kennedy's war record was inaccurate. Jack may well have thought he was going to be court martialed for losing his PT boat--but he was wrong. His superiors knew such things happen in war. There are, for example, friendly fire deaths in every war. They don't mean the soldiers or their commanders necessarily lack competence. It is just a fact of war. Shit, as they say, happens. What really matters is that Kennedy subsequently swam through miles of open sea, towing an injured man on his back with the aid of a belt which he held between his teeth as he swam. (Kennedy had back trouble, in part, due to this ordeal, for the rest of his life.) The fact is, Kennedy led his crew to safety--I think it was 11 guys, one was lost when the PT boat went down--hid them from the Japanese when they made landfall on an island, and succeeded in contacting the Navy by carving out a message on a coconut, which he persuaded the locals to carry back to the nearest American warship. The fact is, no matter what machinations his father may have engaged in on his behalf, John F. Kennedy was a real war hero.

What was amiss with Bragg here? He almost went to pieces at several points.