“... follows that they will go on strutting and preening and considering themselves eligible for what Clive James used to call ‘the grade A crumpet’ until at last senility takes hold. (In James’s phrase, Ford Madox Ford, himself neither young nor pretty, had the grade A crumpet ‘coming at him like ...”

“... of the well-known and the distinguished, neatly making the distinction between the two: ‘Was it Clive James or Jorge Luis Borges, the famous Argentine poet, who pointed out that if we saw every leaf on the tree we would go mad?’ But it takes a talent of greater stamina and range to realise these skills over 184 pages, including index. (Index? Who but ...”

“... Names like Patrick White and A.D. Hope were greeted with candid derision, and nobody had heard of Clive James.* When, at one of the actual Festival’s talk-ins, I said that it was odd to find Peter Porter missing from various standard anthologies of Australian verse, I was given the clear impression that P.P. had simply got what he deserved. Among poets ...”

“... courtly Genji would find him a bore.) Not that the book is to be read as a feminist tract, or (as Clive James resonantly declares on the cover) ‘a voice for a new generation of adventurous women’. The stories as a whole are singularly lacking in the aggression or combativeness that such a summary might imply. If they make a common claim on behalf of ...”

“... Asian history appended to The Gates of Ivory is probably only the second of its kind in fiction. (Clive James, as I recall, made the breakthrough a few years ago.) There are chunks of roman à clef, and at least one recurrent character whose description verges on the libellous. Most of it works, with the exception of some of the more portentous ...”

“... by the passage of time. (‘Thank God and every other god there is/That time is an aesthete,’ Clive James wrote in response to this ‘polychromatic crap’.) In the 18th and 19th centuries, statues were routinely ‘restored’ with sulphuric acid. And in the late 1930s, as if more than two thousand years of weathering hadn’t been enough, the ...”

“... of the death of Princess Diana, the New Yorker ran a series of articles in praise of the Princess. Clive James put on the most astonishing performance, in a widely reprinted piece entitled ‘Requiem: The author mourns a friend who kept her own counsel’, in which he described his relationship with Diana (‘No, there was nothing between me and her ...”

“... Humphries saw Australia more and more clearly by departing from it, returning, departing again. As Clive James wrote in these pages in 1983, ‘if he had not had his Europe, he would never have completed his rediscovery of Australia.’ He represents the dilemma of Australasian and Anglo-African expatriation – the loss and the gain of it. He can only be ...”

“... Yet he’s never so lively as when anticipating his death, and there’s no shortage of humour. Clive James is known to make jokes about the slowness of his passing but Barbellion got there first: ‘Won’t all this seem piffle if I don’t die after all! As an artist in life I ought to die; it is the only artistic ending – and I ought to die now or ...”

“... members of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the outlaw wordsmiths, the rescue operation, this time round, falls to Bradford, a professor at the University of Ulster who’s already written biographies of the Amises, father and son, plus Larkin, among ...”

“... ridiculous, and ultimately fictional. Ingrams to this day keeps a life-size cut-out figure of Sir James in his office – an appropriate touch, since the main result of the case (officially an expensive score-draw) was to turn Goldsmith into Goldenballs, the plump businessman into the cardboard villain. Geoffrey Wansell usefully restores a third dimension to ...”

“... which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne (‘The Frenzy of Sweeney’) is a ...”

“... be the best English version of Pushkin’s poem. The title of his new book comes from a review by Clive James in the London Review of Books†; of both the Pushkin translation and a subsequent book, Poems and Journeys: ‘He is the faithful servant of Empire, who now emerges ... as its last poet.’ Talk about the Last Poet, Johnston’s response to ...”

“... the so-called winter of discontent. Still, it was a much better piece than was generally allowed (Clive James and Richard Ingrams making particular fools of themselves) but it wasn’t what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as ...”

“... Artist Waiting in a Country House’, a sophisticated meditative poem to be read alongside James Fenton’s ‘A Vacant Possession’. The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament two years later set the tone for another politically conscious and responsible collection. The poem ‘returns’ to a photograph taken of the men of St Kilda in 1879, fifty ...”