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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #20: 31.08.15 at 09:36 » |
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The Washington Free Beacon Wikipedia Reading to the End Quote: Clive James at his home in Cambridge /AP | BY: Micah Mattix August 29, 2015 5:00 am Leukemia hasn’t slowed Clive James down a bit. The prolific critic, poet, and broadcaster continues to put out books at an impressive rate since being diagnosed in 2010. He wrapped up his translation of The Divine Comedy in 2013, published a collection of poetry criticism in 2014, and followed it with a book of his own poems earlier this year. Now we have Latest Readings, a collection of short essays on newly discovered books and those he’s been reflecting on his whole life. The title is just right. These aren’t last readings—at least, I’m sure, James hopes not. Death may be waiting around the corner, but until James meets him, he will keep as busy as possible, it seems, reading and writing or browsing the local bookstalls for some forgotten first edition, almost as if he is trying to postpone the inevitable. This doesn’t mean he ignores death. The book is dedicated to the staff at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, where James has been receiving treatment, and he is open about his increasing frailty. But there is little morbidity or self-pity. These essays are about the life of good books. Bad critics lecture, good ones share. James makes you feel as if you are sitting in his kitchen (with adjacent library) talking about his day, which just happens to be filled with reading. What are the best novels-in-series (which, by the way, James thinks Americans are not very good at for some reason)? There’s Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. James remembers being unimpressed when he first read it. Waugh’s prose “is designed to go down like a glass of water,” he remarks with the aversion of a formerly heavy drinker. On re-reading the series, however, he is struck by its “broadness” and “narrative drive”—no small accomplishment for a novelist with a gift for comic portraiture. There’s also Powell’s twelve-volume The Music of Time and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. | But what captures his imagination most is Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant trilogies—two series he had never read before. He is thunderstruck. “Few women, and indeed few men,” James writes, have written fiction that “took in the sweep of modern history. Olivia Manning did it.” The only apt comparison is to that of Proust. The Frenchman’s insight was “how the high society he loved was being riddled with an anti-Semitism that was bound to have long-term consequences.” For Manning, it was “how Europe’s mission civilisatrice in the countries to the south and east was bound to fail, partly because Europe itself was less civilized than it liked to believe.” There are other recommendations, which James shares with unpretentious passion. Osbert Lancaster’s Drayneflete Revealed is still “one of the great British comic achievements,” he writes. The point of Lancaster’s parody is that the distinctiveness of English architecture is its “agglomeration of mediocrity.” Amanda Vail’s 1988 book on Sara and Gerald Murphy—American expatriates who entertained Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, and many other artists on the French Riviera—“is a disarming treatment of a subject that you have to treat disarmingly or get nowhere.” W.G. Sebald’s thin Luftkrieg und Literatur (translated as On the Natural History of Destruction) is “exquisite.” James also muses on the accomplishments and shortcomings of a handful of the 20th century’s greatest writers. Kipling could have been one of the finest poets of the English language, James argues, if had only learned to rein in his interest in dialect and weakness for “flashy wordplay.” Hemingway’s “pose of masculinity” ruined his prose, and Conrad’s accomplishment (in the boring Lord Jim and enthralling Under Western Eyes) is in identifying the 20th century’s struggle between “the imbecility of autocracy and the imbecility of revolution.” One of my favorite pieces is on V.S. Naipaul’s “nastiness.” Naipaul may have written against the caste system in India, but he behaved “like an autocrat” to the women in his life. When a workman at his house once asked him to help open a window, James tells us, Naipaul apparently called his wife at work to complain about being disturbed and told her to come home because there was domestic work to be done. His writing can be equally derisive—but this is all part of his appeal, James writes. We read Naipaul “for his fastidious scorn, not his large heart.” There are a few topical essays. On wit, James writes that the “underlining of a single word is the stroke of wit.” This is a play on Polonius’s remark in Hamlet as well as a gloss on it. On the topic of good artists behaving badly, James remarks with characteristic good sense that the two factors often having nothing to do with each other. “The provenance of art can never be as morally elementary as we wish it.” The first task of the critic is to know what needs to be ignored, a requirement that only becomes clear after many years of wide reading. James certainly knows, and his punchy, entertaining recommendations here makes one hope that his latest readings are only that. | |
| Micah Mattix Micah Mattix is an assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University and a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and many other publications. Kevin Cryan
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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #21: 03.09.15 at 13:20 » |
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The Washington Post Clive James’s ‘Last Readings’ review: A critic’s final homage to literature, life By Michael Dirda September 2 at 5:14 PM Quote:…............. Comparing his work to some of the more leisurely essay-writing of the past, he notes, “I have always assumed that the readers have no time at all, and need their attention snared from moment to moment. ” In a stinging apercu about critics, he points out that “after an initial period of relative sanity, they tend to think that nothing — not even the career of, say, Horace — ever happened without their interest in it. At its worst, the madness reaches the point where the critic behaves as if his new book about Shakespeare will save Shakespeare from oblivion.”................... |
| full article Dirda is a regular book reviewer for Style and the author of the just-published “Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books” Kevin Cryan
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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #22: 06.09.15 at 10:45 » |
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HUSTON*CHRONICLE (Houston Chronicle -- SJB) Two authors, writing toward their endings By Joseph Campana | September 4, 2015 | Updated: September 4, 2015 4:15pm Quote: Late summer's literary harvest also includes "Latest Readings," destined to be among the last writings of the heralded poet, novelist, critic and memoirist Clive James, who announced five years ago his diagnosis of terminal leukemia. But does the end mean the same thing to everyone? James is a critic inimitably and undeniably himself. Every sentence echoes with the confidence and calm of decades of thoughtful, attentive reading. A watchword for James at his best is "intensity." His recent and rather marvelous "Poetry Notebook" subtitles itself "Reflections on the Intensity of Language." "Latest Readings" affirms this priority, that "culture is a matter not of credentials, but only of intensity." James has managed, super-heroically, to do everything from translating Dante to writing about Hollywood. In "Latest Readings" his newest superpowers render him the "Re-reader." There's something beautiful about the way illness returns him to former loves: Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, Philip Larkin and V.S. Naipaul. The anticipation of death ultimately clarifies life. As he puts it: "If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do." So should we all. Yet this is a memoir of reading, not illness. Waning health encourages reflection on what it is to read at a time when the heft of books seems less important than the resolution of screens. The most stirring essays consider Hemingway and Conrad, yielding insight in moments of seemingly casual description. Of "The Sun Also Rises," James says "scarcely anybody is old enough to have a past. They live in the present moment because they are young, and have to." At times, "Latest Readings" requires too much familiarity with James' past work, making "Poetry Notebook" a better choice for first-time readers. But what a wonder to witness a fearless critic face down death and affirm that the history of reading is not a "necropolis" but "an Arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems dark to us only because we will not be in it." For James, death is a spur to life, an occasion to affirm the value of reading. |
| More Information 'Latest Readings' By Clive James. Yale University Press, 192 pp., $25. 'Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems' By James Tate. Ecco, 160 pp., $24.99. Joseph Campana is a poet and Rice University professor. Kevin Cryan
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« Last Edit: 06.09.15 at 16:14 by S J Birkill » |
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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #23: 07.09.15 at 21:36 » |
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The Sydney Morning Herald Latest Readings review: The ongoing brilliance of a fading Clive James Date September 5, 2015 Peter Craven Essays Latest Readings CLIVE JAMES Yale University Press, $29.95 Quote: This is an odd little book but it's a book by a master. We all know that Clive James is not only crook but on the way out. He was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2010 and has made it clear that he does not have long to live, which is a distressing fact, not only in human terms, but because he is one of the great interviewers of the age, a poet of real distinction and the author of a childhood memoir that is some kind of masterpiece. And he is a staggering essayist and a critic of the highest distinction. Latest Readings is a book about the books James is reading now he knows time is limited. But it's also, with exceptional geniality and restraint, the story of a man reading his way to the last exit and the recurrent half-light of personal reference makes the book very moving and fine because it's such a quiet, oblique, unselfconscious self-portrait. James says that his daughter stopped him from just lying on his bed and reading the Bible. She got him to read Patrick O'Brian's​ Jack Aubrey novels, he made himself read Boswell's Life of Johnson and a tremendous urge to read seems to have arisen. Latest Readings is preoccupied with Hemingway and Conrad, two great masters of big-canvas narrative who also had claims to be men of action and they loom like giants. It's also full of James' passion for World War II, his critique of W.G. Sebald's book about the bombing of Dresden, the virtues of William Shirer and Hugh Trevor-Roper on the Nazis, the glamour of Jack and the culture of Jackie Kennedy, the whole bloody cavalcade. | | |
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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #24: 10.09.15 at 13:28 » |
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on 28.08.15 at 16:33, Kevin Cryan wrote: FT Magazine Interview: Clive James August 27, 2015 4.58 pm Caroline Daniel The prolific writer, who was diagnosed with leukaemia five years ago, says the idea of death inspires him, especially not knowing exactly when it will happen Sign in or subscribe Caroline Daniel is editor of FT Weekend. Clive James’s ‘Latest Readings is published by Yale University Press Kevin Cryan |
| This is the Mexican edit: MILENIO.COM Clive James: No sabes si tu obra perdurará Desde que le diagnosticaron leucemia, la muerte ha sido un tema recurrente para el escritor australiano. Sin embargo, mientras el tiempo pasa, el tono en el que escribe es el que cambia “Remordimiento es cuando no haces nada”. (Foto: Cortesía Editorial) Caroline Daniel 07/09/2015 06:00 AM Quote:Clive James surgió como un talentoso y prolífico escritor de poesía, ensayos y una autobiografía, pero hace cinco años, al ex crítico y personalidad de la televisión le diagnosticaron leucemia. La idea de convertirse en polvo, lo inspira, especialmente al no saber cuándo va a suceder... Espiando a través de la ventana clara en su puerta principal, se puede ver a James en una habitación en la parte posterior, escribe en su laptop: “el autor está trabajando”. Es una pena interrumpir su concentración, sin embargo no muestra señales de molestia mientras nos saluda amablemente al fotógrafo y a mí en sus gruesos calcetines negros. Sólo usa calcetines negros flojos estos días ya, que sus pies están hinchados, me dice. Nos lleva a través de una caverna de libros en la habitación principal. Allí hay pilas de revistas New Yorker, notas de los médicos, y un cuaderno de notas rojo y negro. En su laptop, un largo poema en proceso se transcribe de una libreta escrita a mano, con garabatos y una estrofa tachada. James, de 75 años, pasó por muchas “últimas” entrevistas, desde que le diagnosticaron con leucemia en 2010. Lo que llevó a nuestra reunión es su nuevo libro Latest Readings (“Últimas lecturas”), que dedica a los médicos y enfermeras en Addenbrooke, su hospital local en Cambridge............. . |
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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #25: 13.09.15 at 11:10 » |
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Sunday Independent Books: A sign-off of substance... by Clive James Essays: Latest Readings, Clive James, Orion, hbk, 192 pages, €20.55 James Kidd Published 13/09/2015 | 02:30 Last reads: Clive James has compiled a literary bucket list of sorts Terminally ill essayist Clive James takes an elegiac wander around cherished works. Quote: Latest Readings comprises 30 essays written, as the title suggests, in the saddest of circumstances. Diagnosed with terminal leukemia in 2010, Clive James does not seem to be raging against the dying of the light so much as reading until it finally goes out. Late, later, latest: these are almost last readings, undertaken with an affection fit for James's fantasised blue plaque: "I would like it to say: 'He loved the written word, and told the young'." As literary bucket lists go, James' choice of reading is pleasingly scattershot. Heavyweight novelists (Proust, Powell, Conrad, two helpings of Hemingway) mingle with poets (Kipling, Larkin, Stephen Edgar, Richard Wilbur), who rub shoulders with odd sods like Hollywood, Villa America, John Howard and German flying saucers. There is not much recent writing, though Lucy Hughes-Hallett's biography of Gabriele D'Annunzio is one. But if I were in James's position right now, I might not have the time for Go Tell a Watchman either....... |
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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #26: 15.09.15 at 20:49 » |
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] Calling All Readers A lifetime of reading from the great Clive James. By Larry Thornberry – 9.2.15 YouTube Latest Readings By Clive James (Yale University Press, 180 pages, $25) Quote:Poet, author, journalist, and TV personality Clive James has taken some of the last time available to him on this earth to produce a small but very readable book on reading, a lifetime passion for James, who describes himself as “book crazy.” Even omnivorous readers might not be as cavalier as this comment from the 75-year-old James, who was diagnosed with terminal leukemia in 2010: “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.” And so he continues to read, and here takes us along for the ride in a series of short essays that will repay the time of those for whom reading has been central in their lives. James is a thoughtful and articulate man with wide intellectual interests, but he’s not a scholar. He’s far too lively and full of wry humor and good cheer to be a don. And like so many non-academic thinkers, his reading is wide and diverse. These essays touch on James’s recent travels with such literary heavyweights as Conrad, Proust, and Naipaul. He has even been able to read and re-read Hemingway with profit late into adulthood (something many others, myself included, have been unable to do). And there are the poets: Shakespeare, Kipling, Larkin, Stephen Edgar, Richard Wilbur. He even re-strapped-on Boswell’s Life of Johnson. James’ scattershot reading includes as well some lesser known volumes on Hollywood and various precincts of show biz, in which James has been involved and which he finds fascinating. But as he ages he fully understands the difference between the intellectually serious and literary empty calories, consumed for immediate pleasure and no more. “Finally you get to an age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it,” he writes. He calls his rereading of Conrad, than whom there can hardly be anyone more serious, a rediscovery. “My Reconquista of his works is spread throughout this book because that was the way it happened. I didn’t revisit his major novels in a bunch. I tried to space them out, mainly because I was trying to stop. Time felt precious and I would have preferred to spend less of it with him, but he wouldn’t let me go.” (Conradians will understand.) While James calls Conrad’s Nostromo one of “the greatest books I have every read,” he also whoops up Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey sea operas, to which James became addicted after his daughter gave him a copy of Master and Commander. James says he doesn’t read V.S. Naipaul for his (Naipaul’s) heart, there being various opinions on whether or not he has one, but for “his fastidious scorn.” Just so. James’s audience for his literary criticism is the general reader, not the academic specialist. He celebrates literature..................... |
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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #27: 04.10.15 at 14:03 » |
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Book Review: "Latest Readings," by Clive James Clive James reflects on a literary life By John Broening Special to The Denver Post Posted: 10/04/2015 12:01:00 AM MDT Quote:Like his late friend Christopher Hitchens, Clive James has chosen not only to live but to die in public. Say what you will about Hitchens, but he died as he lived — polysyllabically merciless in his pursuit of his bêtes noires, unceasingly productive (he was composing an article on Chesterton on his last day on Earth), pugnaciously refusing any deathbed sentimentality or any tempering of his famous atheism. James has been a different case. Ever since the Anglo-Australian writer and television presenter announced his incurable leukemia, then his emphysema, an insistent self-pitying valedictory note has crept into the endless rounds of farewell interviews he has given on screen and page, just as a dutiful note has crept into the many public tributes he has received. And like Hitchens, it's hard to tell if James can distinguish between obscurity and oblivion. | "Latest Readings" by Clive James, shown here in 1976, is a loosely written chronicle of a life still devoted to bibliomania. (Evening Standard, Getty Images file) |
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Tiny Montgomery
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Latest Readings (London Magazine)
« Reply #28: 05.10.15 at 11:10 » |
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A review of Latest Readings, incorporating a career overview of Clive James, including reference to Pete Atkin and his fans, appears in the latest issue of The London Magazine. http://www.thelondonmagazine.org/tlm-current-issue/?issue=october-november-2015 Link activated, but subscription required, apparently. Thanks Terry -- SJB
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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #29: 19.01.16 at 13:51 » |
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Opinion January 17, 2016 WORD COUNTS Reading until the lights go out Mini Kapoor "A variant of book guilt is also about the lifelong struggle to find space for books.” Why Clive James’s new collection of essays is a perfect mid-January recommendation _______________________________________________________________________ Quote: To be a reader is to be acquainted with so many forms of book guilt — and to anyone wracked by such episodes, may I point you to Clive James’s latest collection of essays, Latest Readings. And if, like me, you treasure that rare gem of a reader’s diary that nudges you to reassemble and perhaps supplement books on your shelf to be reread in a suggested sequence, this is an absolutely perfect mid-January read. When James, the great and flamboyant poet-memoirist-critic who was born in Australia but has made his home in Britain, found out in 2010 that he had leukaemia (“to go with my wrecked lungs”), he threw himself into a planned book of poems, and into reading as much as he wanted. “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out,” he writes, “you might as well read until they do.” As he goes on to write about what he read — mostly, reread — the effect is of staggering abundance. He opens a single book, and before you know it, a reference, a memory or even a random thought has taken him to a few dozen more books in no time. A few pages into Edward St. Aubyn’s novel Lost for Words, he knows he’ll have to go back and reread the Patrick Melrose series. But then, he wonders at the popularity of the Melrose books in America, where “it is as if novels have to be individual, like people”, with exceptions like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman books. And before you know it, he has reread Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, finally read Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant trilogies, finding her “right up there” with Ford Madox Ford’s Tietjens tetralogy, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time — and far above Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (but so what, for some of us Durrell must be reread too). Predictably, as far as literary criticism goes, these essays are too slim to be lasting appraisals — though his essay “Naipaul’s Nastiness” catches the impossibility of definitively judging V.S. Naipaul, or of satisfyingly separating the man from his work, especially novels like A House for Mr Biswas. Criticism is found in more wholesome form in James’s earlier work, but here one ........... |
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Kevin Cryan
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #30: 12.02.16 at 17:02 » |
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Feather-ruffler at work Clive James still has plenty of wit and insight to share. By Mark Broatch In Books 21st January, 2016 Quote:Clive James, author, critic, poet, memoirist and translator, still has, at 76 and with a cluster of life-threatening ailments, writing skills to burn. He has the acuity of a man who has seen – and read – it all. And he has wit, broad and brainy. Combined, they have – in Cultural Amnesia, The Revolt of the Pendulum, and again here in Latest Readings – the uncanny effect of persuading you to read or revisit authors you might skim past in a second-hand bookshop: Conrad, Patrick O’Brian, Powell, Kipling, Sebald. He laments more than once that his generation is the last that will have read, or want to read, some of these dusty names. But that’s just what he’s doing in the last months of his life – perhaps; even he admits he has been dying for a long time – rereading, checking his original views, filling in the odd space in his much-reduced library, from Hugh’s bookstall in Cambridge.... | Clive James: disdain for literary theory and a know-thyself scepticism of all trumpet-blowers. Photo/Getty Images | |
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Re: Latest Readings by Clive James
« Reply #31: 25.03.16 at 23:09 » |
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| Publishers Weekly. | Staff Pick: 'Latest Readings' by Clive James By Peter Cannon | Mar 25, 2016 Quote: | Clive James, the Australian memoirist, poet, translator, critic, and broadcaster, was diagnosed with terminal leukemia in 2010, but this collection of short literary essays, written under that death sentence, is full of life. As I read these pieces in the course of just a couple of hours, I felt as if I were in the same room with this convivial, erudite but never pretentious man as he talked about his favorite authors and books. Happily, I learned we shared many of the same enthusiasms. What a delight, for example, to hear him hold forth on Patrick O’Brian’s nautical adventure novels set during the Napoleonic wars. Much of what James had to say about English sea captain Jack Aubrey and his physician sidekick, Stephen Maturin, I agreed with, though at times I wish I could have asked him to elaborate or even questioned his judgment. Do you really think that C.S. Forester’s Hornblower books are in the same league as O’Brian’s series? Most gratifying was to discover that James recognizes the genius of Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume novel cycle, A Dance to the Music of Time, which by chance I myself was rereading for maybe the third or fourth time. Again, I found myself intimately engaged with the author as he expressed his opinions on this masterpiece focusing on British society from the end of World War I to the 1960s. Well, yes, it does have some dull stretches, but come on, that comic country-house scene is all the more effective because Powell extends it over several pages. I had never read Clive James before, but you can be sure I’ll be eagerly seeking out his other work. . | |
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