For the past decade we have known that Clive James was living on
borrowed time…his life since then has been one long tribute to the books he had read - in so many languages...
He first made an impact on me in the 1970s – with the poetic lyrics he wrote to Pete Atkin’s lovely melodies.
He first made an impact on me in the 1970s – with the poetic lyrics he wrote to Pete Atkin’s lovely melodies.
But his real fame came with his journalism, his television commentaries
and his hilarious multi-volume memoirs.
He was Erasmus, Rabelais, Proust and Dorothy Parker rolled all together
- an epigrammist supreme...
Only an outsider could write sentences like his - you could almost feel
the intelligence subjecting every half-drafted sentence to intense scrutiny to
see how it could be crafted better, with a twist to make the reader
explode...
And that went also for his vignettes of European cultural figures of
the 20th century (in "Cultural Amnesia" for example - although he has several other superb collections of serious essays)
Clive James resource
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/remembering-clive-james-1939-2019/
Clive James resource
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/remembering-clive-james-1939-2019/
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