Clive James

The flame reflected in the welder’s mask Burns the board-rider’s upstage fingertips That cut a swathe across the curved sea-wall Inside the Banzai Pipeline’s tubular swell. Sopranos feel the same fire on their lips Kissing Jochanaan as befits the task.

The crank-winged Chance-Vought F4-U Corsair When turning tightly spilled white vortices Behind its wing-tips in the cobalt...

Apart possibly from waving hello to the cliff-divers Would the real Tarzan have ever touched Acapulco? Not with a one-hundred-foot vine. Jungle Jim maybe, but the Ape Man never. They played a tape at his funeral In the Valley of Light cemetery of how he had sounded Almost fifty years back giving the pristine ape-call, Which could only remind all present that in decline He would wander...

May the Lord have mercy on all those peoples Who suffer from a perversion of religion – Or, to put it in a less equivocating way, Who suffer from an excess of religion – Or, to come right out with it, Who suffer from religion.

Let Him tell those catholic protestants or protestant catholics Who in Northern Ireland go to bed on Saturday night Looking forward to a morning of Holy...

Snails in the letterbox. It is a surrealist image which might have been cooked up by Dali in the presence of Buñuel, by André Breton in the presence of Eluard. But the words were said by Barry Humphries in the persona of the ruminating convalescent Sandy Stone, and in the Australian context they are not surreal. They are real. Every Australian, even if he lives in Sydney’s Point Piper or Melbourne’s Toorak, has at some time or other found snails in the letterbox. When you step outside on a dark and dewy night, the snails crunch under your slippered feet like liqueur chocolates. Snails in Australia are thick on the ground. Nothing could be less remarkable than a cluster of them in your letterbox.

The English are not at their best, although they may well be at their most characteristic, when they go on a lot about the dear old days at school or the ’varsity. Not even the inspired Cyril Connolly could get his tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it. Even if there were room for doubt in this matter, however, there can be no question that an ex-Colonial transplantee who happens to have done some of his growing up in an English school or ’varsity should be slow to bring forth his cosy reminiscences, and very slow to hand them over to anyone else. So when the author of this book about the Cambridge Footlights approached me, in my capacity as one of the club’s numerous surviving ex-Presidents, I imitated the action of the clam. Judging from the relative sparseness of the acknowledgments list, a lot of other alumni did the same thing, for whatever reasons. Probably they were just being cautious. For a professional performer after a certain time, every interview he doesn’t give counts as a victory, on the principle that the label you help them lick is the one that will stick to you longest.