Clive James

Clive James, who died in 2019, was a TV presenter, critic and poet. He wrote five volumes of ‘unreliable memoirs’, several poetry and essay collections, and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Poem: ‘Lock Me Away’

Clive James, 22 September 2005

In the NHS psychiatric test

For classifying the mentally ill

You have to spell ‘world’ backwards.

Since I heard this, I can’t stop doing it.

The first time I tried pronouncing the results

I got a sudden flaring picture

Of Danny La Rue in short pants

With his mouth full of marshmallows.

He was giving his initial and surname

To a new schoolteacher.

Now every time I read the

Letter

A liberal writes

17 March 2005

Is Sheila Fitzpatrick sure of what she means when she talks about ‘the Bukharin/Darkness at Noon model of confessing everything, no matter how bizarre the accusations, “for the good of the cause"’ (LRB, 17 March)? That was indeed what Koestler’s fictional Old Bolshevik did, but it wasn’t what Bukharin did. Bukharin confessed because his family was threatened. So the confidently inserted forward...
Letter

A liberal writes

17 March 2005

Is Sheila Fitzpatrick sure of what she means when she talks about ‘the Bukharin/Darkness at Noon model of confessing everything, no matter how bizarre the accusations, “for the good of the cause"’ (LRB, 17 March)? That was indeed what Koestler’s fictional Old Bolshevik did, but it wasn’t what Bukharin did. Bukharin confessed because his family was threatened. So the confidently inserted forward...

Poem: ‘The Zero Pilot’

Clive James, 5 February 2004

On the Hiryu, Hajime Toyoshima Starred in the group photos like Andy Hardy, He was so small and cute. His face, as friendly as his first name (In Japanese you say hajime at first meeting), Could have been chirping: ‘Hey, why don’t we Put the show on right here in the barn?’ After Pearl Harbor he was one of the great ship’s heroes And the attack on Darwin promised him...

Letter

Superflux

6 March 2003

Jeremy Noel-Tod’s meticulously close reading of a single stanza by Geoffrey Hill (LRB, 6 March) would have been an even better example of how these things should be done if he had spotted the provenance of the word ‘superflux’. In Hill’s Western Front context, it might very well be ‘a word which, horribly, blends the bleeding men with the rain and mud’. But it also contains Hill’s memory...

Burning Love: Clive James’s Dante

Colin Burrow, 24 October 2013

Everyone agrees that The Divine Comedy is wonderful. Just a shaft of song from the spirits in paradise, a phrase or two of Marco of Lombardy in purgatory explaining the birth of the soul, or even...

Read more reviews

Roth, Pinter, Berlin and Me: Clive James

Christopher Tayler, 11 March 2010

‘An onlooker’, Clive James writes in North Face of Soho (2006), the fourth instalment of his memoirs, ‘might say that I have Done Something. But I’m still not entirely...

Read more reviews

Lucky Brrm

John Sutherland, 12 March 1992

Recently in this journal C.K. Stead explained the dilemma of being a popular Australasian performer in England: ‘He can only be fully understood at home: but there he’s likely to...

Read more reviews

Modern Masters

Frank Kermode, 24 May 1990

The qualities these Australian writers have in common, apart from their nationality, are exotic industry, autobiographical fluency and, to adapt what somebody once said about Ford Madox Ford, a...

Read more reviews

Australia strikes back

Les Murray, 13 October 1988

Among Australians, there are punishments for making one’s career abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His...

Read more reviews

Carnival Time

Peter Craven, 18 February 1988

The more Britain affects a déclassé manner while Thatcherism increases the gulf between rich and poor, the more it comes, superficially, to resemble Australia. Linguists speculate...

Read more reviews

Like a row of books by Faber

Peter Porter, 22 January 1987

It was the young Auden, writing at about the time he was composing his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, who declared that you could tell if someone was going to be a poet by considering his...

Read more reviews

Opera Mundi

Michael Neve, 1 December 1983

Opera and opera-going proliferate at very strange times. The opera revival of the last decade is a matter of considerable interest, since in some ways it seems so inappropriate, so profligate,...

Read more reviews

Chances are

Michael Wood, 7 July 1983

‘What a chapter of chances,’ Tristram Shandy’s father says, ‘what a long chapter of chances do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the...

Read more reviews

Recyclings

Christopher Ricks, 17 June 1982

‘He is stuck on himself. It isn’t all that easy to see why. He is, after all, only a literary journalist.’ Clive James hardily dispatches someone who is a television celebrity...

Read more reviews

Fame

Ian Hamilton, 2 July 1981

The first ‘poems’ by Clive James I can remember seeing were in fact song lyrics written to go with the music of Pete Atkin. I call them ‘poems’ because that’s what...

Read more reviews

Banality and Anxiety

Michael Mason, 19 March 1981

It is common knowledge that British publishing is in the doldrums. This is generally thought of as a temporary state of affairs, but it is conceivable that something irreversible is taking place....

Read more reviews

The Whole Secret of Clive James

Karl Miller, 22 May 1980

A little over a year ago, a very good play was screened on BBC Television, Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills. A troupe of adult actors climbed into shorts and re-enacted the days of...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences