Gore Vidal, Dome Concert Hall, Brighton, May 22

2:20pm Friday 23rd May 2008

The last of his generation of post-war novelists, and a nagging thorn in the side of American politics, Gore Vidal looked pretty frail when he was wheeled onto the Dome Concert Hall stage for his first visit to Brighton.

But as soon as the wheelchair-bound octogenarian opened his mouth, you realised the intelligent, biting satirical wit was still there, as he held the sold-out audience spellbound for 90 minutes with a succession of perfectly-composed one-liners and painfully-honest observations.

He also retained the privilege of the old, ignoring any questions host Andrew Marr put to him that he didn't fancy answering, instead happily rambling insightfully about the current political administration on Capitol Hill.

Anyone hoping for a deep insight into Vidal's life would have been disappointed. He didn't talk about his early books or his formative years, and touched only briefly on old friends like the playwright Tennessee Williams, instead preferring to talk about the here and now, quickly batting back any audience questions he wasn't interested in.

He spat acid at George W Bush, describing him as "a known cretin", whose desire to be a war-time president was "a way to steal into history". He thought Blair had been under the misapprehension that he could bluff him, but "very stupid people are hard to bluff".

He also attacked Republican presidential nominee John McCain as someone who hadn't done anything, despite what other people thought, and spoke warmly of his old friend Hilary Clinton as she struggled to get the Democratic nomination.

As someone who has spent years talking about "the American republic", Vidal spoke sorrowfully of the amount of time it was going to take to repair the damage politicians had inflicted on the constitution post-9/11, saying it was going to take at least two centuries to get it back to how it was.

And he was pretty damning of the way religion had taken over politics and reason, saying: "It should be written into the constitution that no one who believes in the afterlife can ever run as president."

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