In this new collection of "technically and emotionally heart-stopping poems" (Spectator)-including "Japanese Maple," which was published in The New Yorker to great acclaim-Clive James looks back over an extraordinarily rich life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty. There are regrets but no trace of self-pity in these verses, which-for all their grappling with death and his current illness-are primarily a celebration of what is treasurable and memorable in our time here. Again and again, James reminds us that he is not only a poet of effortless wit and lyric accomplishment but also an immensely wise one, who delights in using poetic form to bring a razor-sharp focus to his thought. Miraculously, these poems see James writing with his insight and energy not only undiminished but positively charged by his situation. The poems of Sentenced to Life represents a career high point from one of the greatest literary intellects of our age.

Clive James read, learned and recited poetry aloud for most of his life. In this book, completed before just before his death, he offers a selection of his favourite poems and a personal commentary on each. In the last months of his life, his vision impaired by surgery and unable to read, Clive James explored the treasure-house of his mind: the poems he knew best, so good that he didn’t just remember them, he found them impossible to forget. The Fire of Joy is the record of this final journey of recollection and celebration. Enthralled by poetry all his life, James knew hundreds of poems by heart. In offering this selection of his favourites, a succession of poems from the sixteenth century to the present, his aim is to inspire you to discover and to learn, and perhaps even to speak poetry aloud. In his highly personal anthology, James offers a commentary on each of the eighty or so poems: sometimes a historical or critical note on the poem or its author, sometimes a technical point about the poem’s construction from someone who was himself a poet, sometimes a personal anecdote about the role the poem played in his own life. Whether you’re familiar with a poem or not — whether you’re familiar with poetry in general or not — these chatty, unpretentious, often tender mini-essays convey the joy of James’s enthusiasm and the benefit of his knowledge. His urgent wish was to share with a new generation what he himself had loved. This is a book to be read cover to cover or dipped into: either way it generously opens up a world for our delight.

'One of the most important and influential writers of our time' Sunday Times Clive James has been close to death for several years, and he has written about the experience in a series of deeply moving poems. In Sentenced to Life, he was clear-sighted as he faced the end, honest about his regrets. In Injury Time, he wrote about living well in the time remaining, focusing our attention on the joys of family and art, and celebrating the immediate beauty of the world. At the opening of The River in the Sky, a book-length poem, we find James in ill health but high spirits. Although his body traps him in his Cambridge house, his mind is free to roam. The River in the Sky takes us on a grand tour of 'the fragile treasures of his life'. Animated by powerful recollections, James presents a flowing stream of vivid images. He moves from emotionally resonant personal moments, such as listening to jazz records with his future wife, to unforgettable encounters with all kinds of culture: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony sits alongside 'YouTube's vast cosmopolis'. As ever with James, he shares his passions with enormous generosity, making brilliant and original connections, and fearlessly tackling the biggest questions: the meaning of life and how to live it. In the end, what emerges from this autobiographical epic is a soaring work of exceptional depth and overwhelming feeling, a new marvel for the modern age.

21st century Britain: a point of view from Clive James, one of the fiercest and funniest critics. The BBC Radio 4 series A Point of View has been on the air since 2007. Clive James was one of the most popular presenters, and here his original pieces – sixty in total – and previously unpublished postscripts are collected together in one volume. Read along with Clive James as he offers his informative, thought-provoking and entertaining insights into everything from wheelie bins to plastic surgery, Elizabeth Hurley to the Olympics, Britain’s Got Talent to Damien Hirst, Harry Potter to giving up smoking – and plenty more besides.

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, is 'Unreliable Memoirs V', otherwise known as The Blaze of Obscurity. Perhaps his most brilliant memoir, The Blaze of Obscurity tells the inside story of his years in television: it shows Clive James on top form. '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.

Clive James read, learned and recited poetry aloud for most of his life. In the last book he completed before he died, he offers a selection of his favourite poems and a personal commentary on each. In the last months of his life, his vision impaired by surgery and unable to read, Clive James explored the treasure-house of his mind: the poems he knew best, so good that he didn't just remember them, he found them impossible to forget. The Fire of Joy is the record of this final journey of recollection and celebration. Enthralled by poetry all his life, James knew hundreds of poems by heart. In offering this selection of his favourites, a succession of poems from the sixteenth century to the present, his aim is to inspire you to discover and to learn, and perhaps even to speak poetry aloud. In his highly personal anthology, James offers a commentary on each of the eighty or so poems: sometimes a historical or critical note on the poem or its author, sometimes a technical point about the poem's construction from someone who was himself a poet, sometimes a personal anecdote about the role the poem played in his own life. Whether you're familiar with a poem or not - whether you're familiar with poetry in general or not - these chatty, unpretentious, often tender mini-essays convey the joy of James's enthusiasm and the benefit of his knowledge. His urgent wish was to share with a new generation what he himself had loved. This is a book to be read cover to cover or dipped into: either way it generously opens up a world for our delight. 'Clive James's joyous farewell . . . from Thomas Wyatt to Carol Ann Duffy' - Guardian, Best Poetry of 2020

Finally in paperback after six hardcover printings, this international bestseller is an encyclopedic A-Z masterpiece the perfect introduction to the very core of Western humanism. Clive James rescues, or occasionally destroys, the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost."

Clive James's reputation as a poet has become impossible to ignore. His poems looking back over his extraordinarily rich life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty, such as 'Japanese Maple' (first published in the New Yorker in 2014), became global news events upon their publication. In this book, James makes his own rich selection from over fifty years' work in verse: from his early satires to these heart-stopping valedictory poems, he proves himself to be as well suited to the intense demands of the tight lyric as he is to the longer mock-epic. Collected Poems displays James's fluency and apparently effortless style, his technical skill and thematic scope, his lightly worn erudition and his emotional power; it undoubtedly cements his reputation as one of the most versatile and accomplished writers.

'This is the finest critic of his generation on the best poet of his lifetime' - The Times Clive James was a life-long admirer of the work of Philip Larkin. Somewhere Becoming Rain gathers all of James's writing on this towering literary figure of the twentieth century, together with extra material now published for the first time. The greatness of Larkin's poetry continues to be obscured by the opprobrium attaching to his personal life and his private opinions. James writes about Larkin's poems, his novels, his jazz and literary criticism; he also considers the two major biographies, Larkin's letters and even his portrayal on stage in order to chart the extreme and, he argues, largely misguided equivocations about Larkin's reputation in the years since his death. Through this joyous and perceptive book, Larkin's genius is delineated and celebrated. James argues that Larkin's poems, adored by discriminating readers for over half a century, could only have been the product of his reticent, diffident, flawed, and all-too-human personality. Erudite and entertaining in equal measure, Somewhere Becoming Rain is a love letter from one of the world's most critically acclaimed writers to one of its most cherished poets.

In the first volume of Clive James's autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, we said farewell to our hero as he set sail from Sydney Harbour, bound for London, fame and fortune. Finding the first of these proved relatively simple; the second two less so. Undaunted, Clive moved into a bed and breakfast in a Swiss Cottage where he practised the Twist, anticipated poetical masterpieces and worried about his wardrobe . . . Falling Towards England is the entertaining and erudite second part in Clive James' life story, which he continues in May Week Was in June, North Face of Soho and The Blaze of Obscurity.

Over a period of fifteen years Clive James learned French by almost no other method than reading A la recherche du temps perdu. Then he spent half a century trying to get up to speed with Proust's great novel in two different languages. Gate of Lilacs is the unique product of James's love and engagement with Proust's eternal masterpiece. With A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust, in James's words, 'followed his creative instinct all the way until his breath gave out', and now James has done the same. In Gate of Lilacs, James, a brilliant critical essayist and poet, has blended the two forms into one. I had always thought the critical essay and the poem were closely related forms . . . If I wanted to talk about Proust's poetry beyond the basic level of talking about his language - if I wanted to talk about the poetry of his thought - then the best way to do it might be to write a poem. In the end, if A la recherche du temps perdu is a book devoted almost entirely to its author's gratitude for life, for love, and for art, this much smaller book is devoted to its author's gratitude for Proust.

Told with Clive James's unassailable sense of humour and self-effacing charm, Unreliable Memoirs is a hilarious and touching introduction to the story of a national treasure. A million-copy bestseller, this classic memoir is a celebration of life in all its unpredictable glory. With an introduction by political satirist and journalist P. J. O'Rourke. I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me. In the first instalment of James's memoirs we follow the young Clive on his journey from boyhood to the cusp of manhood, when his days of wearing short trousers are finally behind him. Battling with school, girls, various relatives and an overwhelming desire to be a superhero, Clive's adventures growing up in the suburbs of post-war Sydney are hair-raising, uproarious and almost too good to be true . . . 'Do not read this book in public. You will risk severe internal injuries from trying to suppress your laughter.' - Sunday Times.

A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career. Containing over a hundred essays, this is a definitive guide to twentieth century culture, cataloguing and exploring the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers. From Louis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, this is a a illuminating and fascinating work of remarkable erudition. 'Clive James is one of the most ingeniously stimulating literary critics now writing in English. Cultural Amnesia, with its encyclopedic length and organization and the intense jostle of its ideas, is to be dipped into over weeks and months. If the dipper occasionally brings up exasperation, it brings up astonished delight far more often; and, best of all, exasperated astonished delight' Boston Globe

'Finally I realised that I had been practising for this job every time I wrote a quatrain . . . I had spent all this time - the greater part of a lifetime - preparing my instruments.' The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James's vivid translation - his life's work and decades in the making - presents Dante's entire epic poem in a single song. While many poets and translators have attempted to capture the full glory of The Divine Comedy in English, many have fallen short. Victorian verse translations established an unfortunate tradition of reproducing the sprightly rhyming measures of Dante but at the same time betraying the strain on the translator's powers of invention. For Dante, the dramatic human stories of Hell were exciting, but the spiritual studies of Purgatory and the sublime panoramas of Heaven were no less so. In this incantatory translation, James - defying the convention by writing in quatrains - tackles these problems head-on and creates a striking and hugely accessible translation that gives us The Divine Comedy as a whole, unified, and dramatic work.

The most captivating part of perhaps the greatest epic poem ever written, Dante's Inferno still holds the power to thrill and inspire. The medieval equivalent of a thriller, Inferno follows Dante and his faithful guide, Virgil, as they traverse the complex geography of Hell, confronting its many threats, macabre punishments, and historical figures, before reaching the deep chamber where Satan himself resides. Now, in this new translation, Clive James communicates not just the transcendent poetry of Dante's language but also the excitement and terror of his journey through the underworld. Instead of Dante's original terza rima, a form which in English tends to show the strain of composition, James employs fluently linked quatrains, thereby conveying the seamless flow of Dante's poetry and the headlong momentum of the action. As James writes in his introduction, Dante's great poem "can still astonish us, whether we believe in the supernatural or not. At the very least it will make us believe in poetry."

In his insightful collection of poems Clive James looks back over an extraordinarily rich life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty. There are regrets, but no trace of self-pity in these verses, which - for all their open dealings with death and illness - are primarily a celebration of what is treasurable and memorable in our time here. Again and again, James reminds us that he is not only a poet of effortless wit and lyric accomplishment: he is also an immensely wise one, who delights in using poetic form to bring a razor-sharp focus to his thought. Miraculously, these poems see James writing with his insight and energy not only undiminished but positively charged by his situation: Sentenced to Life represents a career high point from one of the greatest literary intelligences of the age. His other poetry collections include Collected Poems, Angels Over Elsinore and Injury Time.

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books 'I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.' Collected here in this brand new edition are the first three volumes of Clive James's million-copy selling autobiographical series: Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, and May Week Was In June. In typically hilarious and self-effacing style, James proves a hugely entertaining and erudite guide to his own remarkable life, with these volumes detailing James's childhood adventures in the suburbs of post-war Sydney, his excited arrival in London as a young man and aspiring poet, and the life at Cambridge University that led to him falling in love (often) and getting married (once). The Complete Unreliable Memoirs: Volume One is an introduction to one the most beloved and acclaimed series of memoirs of all time, from a true national treasure. Other Clive James books available as part of the Picador Collection include The Complete Unreliable Memoirs:Volume Two and Cultural Amnesia.

Opal Sunset marks the exuberant introduction of Clive James's poetry to an American audience. Praised after the publication of Cultural Amnesia as one of the finest prose stylists of his generation, Clive James is now, with the publication of this collection, being granted recognition as the poet he has always been. For much of his long career it was hard to realize that James's gift for poetry underlay his achievements in other fields. First as a television critic on Fleet Street, and later as a television personality in his own right, he achieved such fame for writing the way he spoke that his poetry was regarded as an idiosyncratic sideline, as if no celebrity could write worthy verse. A conundrum presented itself: how could a serious poet also be a television star? But for James, a duty to the discipline of verse was always fundamental, and his accumulated poetic output became impossible to ignore. As early as the 1970s, James's long, mock epic "Peregrine Prykke's Pilgrimage through the London Literary World" received almost unprecedented attention in his adopted England, while later, his satirical short poem "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" became not only a standard verse quoted at fancy dinner parties but entered the culture as lines to be memorized by unpublished writers everywhere. James was suddenly in the odd position of having written famous poems well before he became a famous poet. Finally, the publication of a volume of his collected verse, The Book of My Enemy, earned him in 2003 the reputation as a serious poet that he has long deserved. Less inhibited by fixed categories, a new generation of critics has confirmed what James's public has instinctively known, that he brings his poems to life with all the resources to be found in his prose: wit, imagination, social observation, and a dazzling play of language. In addition, his poems have an unmistakably characteristic rhythm that makes it compulsory to read them aloud. Switching between strict stanzas and free forms as the occasion suits, James brings a compulsively readable coherence to either mode; and always, over and above the binding force of his metrical assurance, there is a lyricism that brings even the plainest statement to extra life, and which often enters deeply into realms of human emotion. His later poems about the tragedy that struck his mother and father, for example, show an intensity of regret that mark his maturity as a poet and bring out his unashamed nostalgia for his homeland, Australia. Opal Sunset is a treasure chamber of epigrammatic jewels to which the reader will return again and again.

'If you are vacillating over whether a couple of bottles of pinot blanc might, in the short run, prove more fun than a poetry book, then just flick to the first page and the title poem of this volume. James writes with exquisite perception and surgical precision; he is a poet of powerful argument and emotional force' The Times The reputation of Clive James as a poet was slow to form, perhaps because he was too famous as a star journalist and television entertainer. There was also the drawback that his poetry was so entertaining it was hard for many critics to take seriously. But after the notoriety achieved by a single self-satirizing poem, 'The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered', one of the most anthologized poems of recent times, James's poetic output became impossible to ignore, and his 1985 collection Other Passports was greeted with praise for its thematic scope and technical accomplishment, even by critics who still doubted his seriousness. Since then, James has emerged unarguably as one of the most prominent poets of his generation -- and The Book of My Enemy (which includes Other Passports) shows why. 'Page after page of The Book of My Enemy confirms James has the primary, sine qua non gifts of a poet. He rejoices in language, and he shows enormous skill in using it' Sunday Telegraph 'Reading these poems is like listening to a talking book, which infests the poems with personality, with that familiar braggadocio, that strictly upbeat delivery ...The poems here have skip, insights, timing and agreeable passion' Independent

A love letter from one of the world’s best living writers to one of its most cherished poets.

Clive James is a life-long admirer of the work of Philip Larkin. Somewhere Becoming Rain gathers all of James’s writing on this towering literary figure of the twentieth century, together with extra material now published for the first time.

The greatness of Larkin’s poetry continues to be obscured by the opprobrium attaching to his personal life and his private opinions. James writes about Larkin’s poems, his novels, his jazz and literary criticism; he also considers the two major biographies, Larkin’s letters and even his portrayal on stage in order to chart the extreme and, he argues, largely misguided equivocations about Larkin’s reputation in the years since his death.

Through this joyous and perceptive book, Larkin’s genius is delineated and celebrated. James argues that Larkin’s poems, adored by discriminating readers for over half a century, could only have been the product of his reticent, diffident, flawed, and all-too-human personality.

Erudite and entertaining in equal measure, Somewhere Becoming Rain is a love letter from one of the world’s best living writers to one of its most cherished poets.

Literary critic, cultural commentator, TV personality, journalist, poet, political analyst, satirist and Formula One fan: Clive James is a man (and master) of many talents, and the essays collected in The Meaning of Recognition are testament to that fact. Whether discussing Bing Crosby, Bruno Schulz or Shakespeare, he manages to prioritize style and substance simultaneously, his tone never less than pitch-perfect, his argument always considered. With each phrase carefully crafted and each piece offering cause for thought, the resulting volume - which takes the reader from London to Bali, theatre to library, from pre-election campaigning to sitting in front of the TV at home, watching The Sopranos and The West Wing - is remarkable not only for its range and insight, but also its intimacy and honesty. A contemporary everyman, James is also unmistakably himself, and The Meaning of Recognition shows him at his witty, learned - and heartfelt - best. His other essay collections include The Crystal Bucket, The Dreaming Swimmer, Snakecharmers in Texas and Even as We Speak.

His second work of fiction, following Brilliant Creatures, Clive James's The Remake is a brilliantly observed novel, filled with his trademark erudition and humour. Joel Court had problems. He'd lost his wife, his mistress, quite possibly his career as an astronomical wizard, and had ended up living with Chance Jenolan, to whom success was a way of life, and whose Barbican fortress was protected by a maze that would shame the Minotaur. To make matters worse, there was the Mole. Her heavenly body outshone all the celestial manifestations Joel had ever seen. Pretty soon, he would not be able to bear having her out of his sights . . .