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.
The first televising of the House of Lords, on 23 January was, I found, a pleasant shock. It might well be that the other viewers consisted entirely of the unemployed, but I doubt if even the most bitter among them felt that time and money were being wasted. Helping to make the broadcast a surprise were one’s expectations, which could not help but be dire.
Changes in temperature entail turmoil.Petits pois palpitate before they boil. Ponds on the point of freezing look like oil And God knows what goes on below the soil.
God and the naturalists, who penetrate With camera crews to depths as dark as fate And shoot scenes hideous to contemplate Where burrowing Attenboroughs fight and mate.
In outer space the endless turbulence Seems too far gone to...
Hostathion contains Triazophos, Controls seed weevil, pea moth, carrot fly. Of pesticides Hostathion is the boss. Pests take one sip, kick up their heels and die.
They never find out what Hostathion is. Triazophos remains the merest word, Though partly echoed by the acrid fizz Which suddenly grows too loud to be heard.
Hostathion was once Achilles’ friend, Staunch at his elbow before...
My gesture towards Finnegans Wake is deliberate.
Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style
The gesture towards Finnegans Wake was deliberate. It was not accidental. Years of training went into the gesture, As W.C. Fields would practise a juggling routine Until his eczema-prone hands bled in their kid gloves; As Douglas Fairbanks Sr trimmed the legs of a table Until, without...
Female desire aims to subdue, overcome and pacify the unbridled ambition of the phallus.
Roger Scruton
The unbridled phallus of the philosopher Was seen last week galloping across the South Downs, Flame spurting from its flared nostril.
The phallus being a horse in which Both mane and tail are bunched together at the back end, This unharnessed piece of horseflesh was of necessity unable...
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...
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
‘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...
‘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...
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...
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....
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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