OK, s I don't really like Clive James very much. The book was a gift from a much beloved baby boomer friend, and all I could really think as I read it was that James erudite, academically arrogant style was perhaps a generationally based taste. The world that James inhabits so easily, of the 'can...
Literary critic, cultural commentator, TV personality, journalist, poet, political analyst, satirist and Formula One fan: Clive James is a man (and master) of many talents, and the essays collected here are testament to that fact. Whether discussing Bing Crosby, Bruno Schulz or Shakespeare, he ma...
The estimable James, novelist, poet, and critic, has an opinion on everything having to do with culture and the arts, and with Cultural Amnesia , an alphabetized collection of essays on the artists, poets, musicians, writers and film makers he feels we should be conversant in, lest we forget, get...
I could happily read James just writing out the phone directory at this point. Even the numbers themselves would be laconically delivered and have a killer joke to finish. James remains a rare combination of intellect, wit and readability. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with him he’s almost ...
E. Cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be. Along with his love lyrics that achieved notoriety by fragmenting all over the page like sexy grenades, he wrote poems that were meant to be satires. In his 1926 collection, is 5, the star among the w...
On assignment from the Observer, and faced with such daunting tasks as interviewing Zbigniew Brzezinski, I needed books that would explain the American political system to me as concisely as possible. In his knowledgeable analysis of how the power structure of the media related to the power struc...
In context, this passage carries many times the weight of any ordinary nature-notes: the book is already half over, a splitting head of steam has been built up and the reader is by now in no doubt that the luxury of summer is being withdrawn from the writer himself, from the historical district i...
Expert opinions of the recent second edition were not much more favourable than they were for the first, mainly because the translator had not done enough to eliminate what were earlier judged to be eccentricities of diction, while the commentary obstinately remained unmodified in all its idiosyn...
The first part was called ‘Gangsters Guns and Getaways’: no comma, no apologies for brashness. ‘Us British love films,’ the commentary began, grammatically daring from the first word. Had Bergman ever spoken like that in Swedish, or Antonioni in Italian? But the slapdash e...
After absorbing William L. Shirer’s classic The Collapse of the Third Republic, the student of modern French politics, in order to follow everything that happened afterwards, could safely settle down to read nothing but books by, about, for and against de Gaulle. The argument about whether the so...