“... To Clive James Trapdoor The origin of metaphor is strange. As boys we used (but don’t let me forget I only watched, I wasn’t very brave) To put two spiders in a bottle, wave It over flame, which usually made them fight, Or flood them from their deep holes for a change. These were the deadly trapdoors whose one bite Sent an inclusive poison racing through Your veins: I think we thought the risk absolved Us from all guilt, our cruelty dissolved In danger ...”

“... and so does Billy Connolly, alone among broadcasting talent (unless you count Alistair Cooke and Clive James, who provide epigraphs). This may be because Lawson overlooked Connolly when it came to changing the names, or it may be because he forgot Connolly isn’t a member of the royal family. ‘I think you get into such an alternative Britain, once ...”

“... physical immediacy and metaphysical urgency, his material weight and his spiritual profundity. So Clive James can’t be blamed for joining the ranks of the respectable failures. He has given us a Dante who is approachable and affable, and almost always readable, but who is unequivocally heavy rather than fluid or mellifluous. When ...”

“... especially if you take into account what Moss calls ‘their chums from other disciplines – Clive James, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Redmond O’Hanlon’. Together, novelists and ‘chums’ are not unlike a coterie of window-cleaners crowded onto a single boatswain’s chair (or rather ...”

“... do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of ...”

“... won a race of her own, staying shtum publicly, her death a surprise except to the few who knew. So Clive James (announced May 2011 – ?) and Diski (announced 11 September 2014 – ?) still battle it out for third place. In the other kind of race, last man standing, James and Diski would be meandering towards first and ...”

“... Madox Ford, a desire to write well so strong that it shows. According to his own listing, this is James’s 24th book. So at 50, despite his relatively inauspicious start and his obvious determination to obey the master’s injunction and live all he can, he is only about seventeen titles behind his namesake at that age. And Henry, after all, was never ...”

“... has at all softened – and I think it has – then the chief credit must surely be given to Clive James. Glued to the Box* is the third and final collection of his Observer pieces and, along with its two predecessors, it will stand as a once-only critical phenomenon: ten years’ worth of high intelligence and wit scrutinising ten years’ worth of ...”

“... Piper-Heidsieck for later. Tuesday 1 January: SpentRéveillon with Jean-Claude, Annick and friend. Clive James on BBC1 after midnight. Next day, Brasserie lunch in place du Châtelet. Taxi to Musée d’Orsay. Like many other furious people, found it closed because of bank holiday. Without warning, went to call on Méraud Guevara, rue de Lille behind the ...”

“... subject which Larkin himself seems to have thoroughly approved of, and quotes in a letter, was by Clive James in his collection The Metropolitan Critic. ‘Just now and again James says something really penetrating: “originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry” – I’ve been feeling that for ...”

“... Bush had chosen to build up Iraq as part of a divide-and-rule strategy in the Gulf; that he and James Baker had knowingly protected the banks, businesses and departments of state which financed the great Ba’athist rearmament, and that (perhaps worst of all) the time of closest military and intelligence collusion had coincided with Baghdad’s gruesome ...”

“... was something nouveau about the new bonkbusters that perfectly suited the times. A point made by Clive James in these pages in a review of Princess Daisy: ‘Mrs Krantz would probably hate to hear it said,’ he wrote, ‘but she gives the impression of having been included late amongst the exclusiveness she so admires. There is nothing wrong with ...”

“... of their rulers’ misprision, were both actors and spectators. (I remember a scene from a Clive James documentary on Bombay in which, fake sword in hand, he dressed up in Oriental costume to take part in a Bollywood film. James thought he and his British audience would have a good laugh; he didn’t realise the ...”

“... seize on any pairings that offered themselves (‘his antagonisms and his ingratiations’ – of James Kelman; ‘drugs … poured their balm, but embalmed him’ – of Robert Lowell; ‘Emmas, Cockburn and Rothschild’ – a Listener cover line; ‘Gray’s Elegy, and Wynne Godley’s’ – an LRB cover line), was always there but became more pronounced ...”

“... yet know.That’s one way to do it. In a valedictory poem published in the LRB (6 February 1986), Clive James made a similar point, though less unctuously:A bedside manner in your graveyard toneSuggests that at the last we aren’t alone.You wouldn’t have agreed, of course. You saidWithout equivocation that life endsWith him who lived it definitely ...”