James claimed to have an “ungovernable ego” but was quite capable of uxoriousness. He was married to Prue Shaw, a Cambridge scholar, with whom he had two daughters: Claerwen and Lucinda. James protected all three from media intrusion, though he gave an insight into his admiration for his wife when he produced her book on Dante for an interviewer: “That’s the real McCoy. That will always be there. The kind of stuff I do is more conjectural. I am still trying to impress her.” He once said: “I think marriage civilised me. It may sound sexist, but it is one of the roles of women to civilise men.” James, Clive (1975). The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media: A Moral Poem. Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-01185-3. a b "Clive James reflects on career, poetry and death in interview with Kerry O'Brien". ABC News. 7 September 2013 . Retrieved 28 November 2019. Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization' - J. M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace

Gough argued: “James is an absolute master of surface, and the great critic of surfaces, not because he is superficial but because he believes that the distortions on the surface tell you what’s underneath. Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth. With the essays and the poems – which I think you have to consider as one great project – he’s built an immense, protective barrier reef around western civilisation.” Miller and James were in the public eye as young men, middle-aged men, old men. James had a late flowering during his time of slow dying, although Miller’s last years of frailty were silent ones. They remained men of their time, whichever time that was – and of course, they were men. It is hard to imagine a woman being allowed such longevity, or being accepted as both hilarious and serious. Beresford, Bruce (8 September 2018). "Bruce Beresford: At last, making the film that obsessed me for 30 years". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 27 November 2019. a b Decca Aitkenhead "Clive James: 'I would have been an obvious first choice for cocaine death. I could use up a lifetime's supply of anything in two weeks'", The Guardian, 25 May 2009. But Castro’s more typical form of communication is the speech, and his speeches have to be experienced to be believed. Most of the jokes made about them are made by people who have never really listened to him: they have just seen footage of him tossing his beard about while jabbing his finger at the air. In real life, if it can be called that, Castro carries the leader’s monologue to lengths that should be physically impossible: a dedicated scuba-diver, he can probably do without the oxygen tanks, because he must have the lungs of a sperm whale. Camus, who played soccer, would have admired Castro’s sporting proclivities but might have found his oratory suspect. Offshore admirers of Castro’s putative intellectual vitality are fond of explaining how the people of Cuba—happy, salsa-dancing folk whose simple minds can be read from long range—find his oratorical powers endlessly entertaining, but the emphasis should be on the endlessly, not the entertaining. A sceptic might note that Castro’s supposedly spellbinding effect presupposes the absence of other forms of verbal entertainment, and indeed the absence of a substantial part of the Cuban population. Cubans who head for Miami with nothing but an inflatable inner tube between them and the sharks are unanimous on the point: Castro’s speeches would have been enough to drive them out even if the regime’s other promises of abundance had been kept.He planned a sixth and last volume of memoirs, “the final chapter of which”, he told one interviewer, “will be dictated while I have an oxygen tent over my head. I wouldn’t like to spare the public my conclusions.” Cultural Amnesia is designed to be dipped into casually, but it can be read from beginning to end if you want to set your scalp on fire. (...) Although he takes aim at literary theory, academic obscurantism, racism, reverse-racism and intellectual dishonesty of every stripe, Mr. James’ recurrent theme is the danger of political ideologies. Signing onto an ideology entails ignoring all evidence to the contrary. It’s a mind-shutting maneuver. (...) Mr. James’ tone ranges from confiding to bombastic, and he’s entertaining at either extreme. His conclusions are brilliantly reasoned, but his relentless focus on World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges and extreme authoritarianism is enough to convince you that there were no hula hoops, no soap operas, no cupcakes in the 20th century -- in fact, that intellectual seriousness demands that there be no cupcakes." - Regina Marler, The New York Observer But worthy figures, the ones who saw the horror and warned of it, dominate, James trying to show example after example of what people were capable of (though admitting also often that it defeated them). Gruber, Fiona (25 September 2015). "A late afternoon with Clive James". ABC . Retrieved 28 November 2019.

It's frustrating, because there are threads running through all of this, several at a time -- but it's not tied together well enough to truly make for an argument (or several). James was born Vivian Leopold James in Kogarah, a southern suburb of Sydney. He was allowed to change his name as a child because "after Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O'Hara the name became irrevocably a girl's name no matter how you spelled it". [4] He chose "Clive", the name of Tyrone Power's character in the 1942 film This Above All. [5] Although a long book, Cultural Amnesia is not substantial. Don’t expect it to be instructive. (...) James sits on the judge’s bench assessing each author for their views. This is no mere collection of bits; it is a book with a theme, namely how the Kingdom of Letters did or did not stand up to the murderous philistinism of the dictators, especially Hitler and Stalin." - A.N.Wilson, Sunday Times James was born in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. His mother, Minora (nee Darke), named her only child Vivian, after the male star of the 1938 Australian Davis cup team. It could have been worse. There was, James noted in Unreliable Memoirs (1979), a famous Australian boy whose father named him after his campaigns across the Western Desert: he was called William Bardia Escarpment Qattara Depression Mersa Matruh El Alamein Benghazi Tripoli Harris.

Thorne, Frank (1 May 2011). "Clive James: I'm fighting a leukaemia 'that couldn't wait to start' ". Express.co.uk. Reviewing the book for The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens argued that James tries "to glamorize the uninspiring - tries to show how tough and shapely were the common sense formulations of Raymond Aron for example, when set against the seductive, panoptic bloviations of Jean Paul Sartre" and that he "succeeds in it by trying to comb out all centrist clichés and by caring almost as much about language as it is possible to do." Additionally, Hitchens noted that "a unifying principle of the collection is its feminism" and that "one of James's charms as a critic is that he genuinely seems to enjoy praising people." [3] Contents [ edit ] James gained a place at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read English literature. [ citation needed] Whilst there, he contributed to all the undergraduate periodicals, was a member and later President of the Cambridge Footlights, and appeared on University Challenge as captain of the Pembroke team, beating St Hilda's, Oxford but losing to Balliol on the last question in a tied game. [ citation needed] Indeed, Cultural Amnesia is less a collection of great figures than of great sentences. Each entry begins with a thumbnail sketch of the individual in question but mainly consists of James's commentary on one or more quotations drawn from his or her writing. Sometimes the commentary concerns its author, sometimes not. No matter what it concerns -- pornography, movie dialogue, the politics of literary exile, the problem of high seriousness in modern art -- it is invariably absorbing. Reading the book feels like having a conversation with the most interesting person in the world: You're not saying much, but you just want to keep listening anyway. The reason James is such a good talker, though, is that he's such a good listener." - William Deresiewicz, The Nation He described Murray Walker, the motor-racing commentator, as "talking as if his trousers are on fire". [48]

Appleyard, Bryan (12 November 2006). "Interview Clive James". The Times. London . Retrieved 30 April 2010. Zayed, Alya (27 November 2019). "Australian broadcaster Clive James dies in Cambridge". Cambridge News . Retrieved 27 November 2019.

Jacket Blurb

To summarize the 20th century takes guts, and not a little irrational exuberance — or, in James’s coinage, “desolate exuberance.” The great British rememberer V. S. Pritchett could pull it off by sense memory alone. In an essay he wrote in 1980, he contrasted the sterile technology, hygiene and paranoia of the late cold-war era with the lusty vitality of civilization before the Great War. “The smell of that London of my boyhood and bowler-hatted youth is still with me,” he wrote. “The streets smelled of beer; men and boys reeked of hair oil, Vaseline, strong tobacco. ... The smell of women was racy and scented.” The somber American cold warrior George Kennan covered the same ground in seven decades of journals. In “Sketches From a Life,” unintentionally hilarious in its unbroken glumness, the entries begin in 1927 with the “lurid, repulsive alleys” of Hamburg, the “ill-dressed, slouching, brutalized” Communist hordes and the weary lament “Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible.” (Kennan was then 23.) The calamities of World War II only deepened his funk. In short, there can be no objective century; every man lives his own, every woman lives hers. Andrew Collins on working with Clive James: "to collaborate with him was like winning a competition" ". Radio Times . Retrieved 28 November 2019.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010. [54] He was an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge (his alma mater). In the 2015 BAFTAs, James received a special award honouring his 50-year career. [55] In 2014, he was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy. [56]urn:lcp:culturalamnesian00jame:epub:5ba8e8c8-e67a-4fa0-8c5a-2035d813422f Extramarc Duke University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier culturalamnesian00jame Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t88h2mv8x Invoice 1213 Isbn 9780393061161 It is an interesting and appealingly mixed assemblage (it's hard not to approve when he even throws Dubravka Ugresic into the mix), and there are good points made by these examples. He described the voice of Greek singer Demis Roussos of "having the sound of a Chihuahua caught in a revolving Dalmatian".