Aside from being an essayist, novelist and screenwriter, Gore Vidal was a grade-one gossip, his published writings and private conversation stuffed with rumour and conspiratorial hints. But now, less than 18 months after Vidal passed into history, he is himself subject to the most reputation-destructive scuttlebutt there is: the suggestion that he may have been a paedophile. In connection with a new book about Vidal, his half-sister and a nephew have hinted that he may have had a secret passion for underage boys. And Vidal more or less admitted it himself, writing in his memoir Palimpsest that he was "attracted...