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“... or died of cancer the last few weeks, so cancer has a bit of a domestic ring about it. (No, Clive James is still with us.) Incidentally, anyone wanting to send me a late Xmas sorry-you’re-dying prezzie, I want silk or organic cashmere something, so I can waft my way through the box sets and die happy at having seen the last episode of The Bridge ...”

“... of the press’s traditional heartless sensationalism? Though they could, of course, be both. Clive James once cruelly rebuked an Observer subeditor who had sought to sharpen his prose style and improve his jokes with the remark, ‘Listen, if I wrote like that I’d be you.’ Félix Fénéon might be the perfect counter-example: the sub who wrote ...”

“... of Tinker Tailor – ‘a device so simple that it left him genuinely elated by its symmetry’. Clive James, writing in 1977, had similar feelings about the ‘symmetrical economy’ of The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he ...”

“... After September, can there be any doubt at all? There are still trusties like Vernon Bogdanor and Clive James who feel that ‘we’ cannot live without the institution, and hence – since this institution is unavoidably genetic – without the well-meaning Charles as a bridge to a brighter future in Prince William’s sun. But such keep-it-up ...”

“... is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But in this too, oddly enough, one can fail to find Larkin: because ...”

“... discussed the case of Eliot and that of Ezra Pound with Professor Ricks, Annie Cohen-Solal and Clive James. Professor Steiner began by discomfiting Ricks: there were, he remarked humorously, two attacks in the TLS which Professor Ricks, fresh from his transatlantic flight, would not have had time to come to terms with. A wan smile from Professor ...”

“... depends on what you consider to be cheating. Writing about literary magazines in the LRB in 1985, Clive James paraphrased an insight of Wittgenstein’s: ‘A game consists of the rules by which it is played.’ I’ve often thought about that remark since I first read it as a graduate student. I’m still not quite sure whether it’s a dazzlingly ...”

“... plenty of tedious manoeuvring and not much grand strategy. I’m often reminded of a remark by Clive James, writing about Game of Thrones: ‘Where contending forces are invincible, there can be no plausible conflict, only choreography.’ There is no drama when computers play, but their tactical insights, especially their ability to weasel out of ...”

“... Contrary to the impression formed in some quarters, I do not know Clive Ponting well. Apart from a three-hour meeting in the presence of Brian Raymond, his remarkably gifted and industrious solicitor, in the early autumn of last year, I have never had a proper conversation with him. And that meeting related to the issue of whether I should lend my voluminous files and records of letters – some thirty-two boxes which would have taken up a large part of a pantechnicon – since he found himself in the position of having to defend himself without access to the Ministry of Defence records ...”

“... Caliban’s withering speech on art’s place in society, pitched in the late style of Henry James where happy endings are in short supply. ‘We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed, in seats we have paid for, unless there were others who are not here … others who have not been so fortunate.’ Near the end of his life Auden said ...”

“... turn out to be the only man in England who doesn’t chuckle his way through the second volume of Clive James’s memoirs – Falling towards England: Unreliable Memoirs, Part Two.3 When James arrived in England in the early Sixties, he had no money, nowhere to live and not very much to wear, apart from a white nylon ...”

“... Bell in the street (she was wearing ‘her quiet black hat’) and gone with her to her husband Clive Bell’s house. ‘Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat you’re wearing!’ Woolf wrote in her diary. ‘Then he asked where I got it. I pretended a mystery, tried to change the talk, was not ...”

“... made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the ...”

“... muted, one could have been forgiven, thought Treacher, for thinking this was a wedding not a wake. Clive Dunlop, the dead man, was quite young – 34 according to the dates given on the front of the Order of Service, though there were some in the congregation who had thought him even younger. Still, it was a shocking age to die, there was no disagreement about ...”

“... are offered a kind of Bloomsbury ‘Jennifer’s Diary’, with Raymond and Saxon and Maynard and James and Alix and Clive and Roger and the rest flitting through the pages, lunching and staying and talking, while outside, offstage, not often mentioned, quite other things are going on. The century is barely there. And this ...”