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Audiobooks Narrated by Clive James
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'I was never alone except in the toilet, where I soon found that locking myself into a cubicle was not much protection from hearing myself talked about by young men standing at urinals. ("Jesus, he's looking rough." "And it's only Monday.")
Reviews for Clive James's fourth volume of memoirs, North Face of Soho, included several that specifically requested a further volume; Clive James duly obliged and here, in all its glory and read aloud by the author, is 'Unreliable Memoirs V', otherwise known as The Blaze of Obscurity.
Perhaps his most brilliant book yet, The Blaze of Obscurity tells the inside story of his years in television: it shows Clive James on top form - both then and now.
'In the case of many people who attempt an autobiography even a single volume is one too many . . . In the case of Clive James, the volumes now in existence are too few. If the final tally puts him up there with Marcel Proust, so much the better' Financial Times
Following the publication of his 1986 collection, Other Passports , Clive James has emerged as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, going on to publish new works in such mainstream outlets as the TLS, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, the New Yorker and the Australian Book Review, and now culminating in this updated collection, The Artificial Horizon, the second volume of Poems From The Book of My Enemy, read aloud by the author.
'In this book can be heard the merest edge of an enormous conversation. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room, wearing name tags in case they don't recognize each other (although some recognize each other all too well, and avoid contact). My heroes and heroines are here. The reader will recognize some of their names, while other names will be more obscure. My intellectual betes noires are here too, and the same division might apply.'
An almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James' unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the twentieth-century. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book, read aloud by the author, is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
Following the publication of his 1986 collection, Other Passports , Clive James has emerged as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, going on to publish new works in such mainstream outlets as the TLS, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, the New Yorker and the Australian Book Review, and now culminating in this updated collection, read aloud by the author, Poems From The Book of My Enemy.
'Clive James is a true poet. Line after line of his has a characteristic personal tone, a kind of end-stopped singingness which is almost independent of what it says' Peter Porter, London Review of Books
After Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England and May Week Was in June comes the fourth instalment in Clive James's life, North Face of Soho, read by the author. His fourth volume of autobiography is every bit as eventful, entertaining, engrossing and honest as the previous three.
At the very end of May Week Was in June, we left our hero sitting beside the River Cam one beautiful 1968 spring day, jotting down his thoughts in a journal. Newly married and about to leave the cloistered world of Cambridge academia for the racier, glossier life promised by Literary London, he was, so he informed his journal, reasonably satisfied. With his criticism beginning to appear in magazines and newspapers such as the New Statesman, and his poetry published in Carcanet, as well as a play then being performed to rave reviews at the Arts Theatre, James had good reason to be content. But what happened next?
This is the question posed, and answered by, North Face of Soho. Intelligent, amusing and provocative - the words apply to the man himself as much as his memoirs - it's a book that will be loved by the legions of Clive James fans worldwide.
