Vidal in Venice, the book of the television script, is part pocket-history, part waiting-room art, part tourist guyed. But the best parts are those in which Vidal compares Venetian and American political systems and arrangements. Good, too, is the chapter on Thomas Coryate, the early seventeenth-century "Innocent Abroad," England's first of the breed. And special mention should be made of the photographs, excellent in themselves, well-positioned as illustrations of the text, and successful in avoiding the over-familiar subjects and angles of postcard veduti...

As "directors of intelligence and counter-intelligence," the Venetians were incomparably more clever and economical than their American successors, and the book's comparison between the efficiency of Venice's Three Inquisitors, its spies and secret codes, its agents and assassins, and the bungling CIA, with its mammoth apparatus, is vintage Vidal.