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.

Letter
SIR: It is gratifying to be taken so seriously by Peter Porter (LRB, 22 January), even when he takes me to task. On points of fact: a. There is a misprinted line in my verse letter to Pete Atkin, but the line Mr Porter puzzles over is not it. I wonder why that line sounds wrong to him, although not as hard as I wonder how the other line sounds right. b. In the stanza he quotes from my verse letter...

Triangular Macquarie Place, up from the Quay, Is half rain forest, half a sculpture park Where can be found – hemmed in by palms and ferns, Trees touching overhead – the Obelisk From which, one learns, All Public Roads are Measured Leading to the Interior of the Colony. Skyscraper cliffs keep this green garden dark.

The Obelisk is sandstone. Thomas Mort Is also present, bronze on...

You never travelled much but now you have, Into the land whose brochures you liked least: That drear Bulgaria beyond the grave Where wonders have definitively ceased – Ranked as a dead loss even in the East.

Friends will remember until their turn comes What they were doing when the news came through. I landed in Nairobi with eardrums Cracked by the flight from Kichwa Tembo. You Had...

With more than eight hundred high-grade items to choose from, London Reviews gets the number down to just 28. But already it is the third such selection from the London Review of Books. Is three neat volumes sitting on a shelf better than hundreds of copies of the magazine mouldering in a corner? Yes, but not emphatically. When a literary magazine is as good as this one it hurts to throw old copies away. Visiting I.F. Stone once in Washington, I was impressed by his complete bound files of the New York Review of Books, and more impressed still that he had extracted these from the editor as part-payment.

Poem: ‘Sack Artist’

Clive James, 18 July 1985

Reeling between the redhead and the blonde Don Juan caught the eye of the brunette. He had no special mission like James Bond. He didn’t play the lute or read Le Monde. Why was it he on whom their sights were set?

For let’s make no mistake, the women pick Which men go down in history as avid Tail-chasers with the enviable trick Of barely needing to chat up the chick – From...

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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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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...

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