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.

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

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.

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.

'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.

'James's confrontation with his approaching death is nothing short of inspirational' - Joan Bakewell, Independent The publication of Clive James's Sentenced to Life was a major literary event. Facing the end, James looked back over his life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty to produce his finest work: poems of extraordinary power that spoke to our most elemental emotions. Injury Time, following Sentenced to Life, finds James with more time on the clock than he had anticipated, and all the more determined to use it wisely - to capture the treasurable moment, and think about how best to live his remaining days while the sense of his own impending absence grows all the more powerfully acute. In a series of intimate poems - from childhood memories of his mother, to a vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic flight - James declares 'family' to be our greatest blessing. He also writes beautifully of the Australia where he began his life, and where he hopes to 'reach the end'. Throughout Injury Time, James weaves poems which reflect on the consolation and wisdom to be found in the art, music and books which have become ever more precious to him in his last years. The poems in this moving, inspirational and unsentimental book are as accomplished as any he has ever written; indeed the unexpected gift of James's Injury Time shows him to be in the form of his life.

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.

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."

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.

'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.

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.

A world-renowned media and cultural critic offers an insightful analysis of serial TV drama and the modern art of the small screen Television and TV viewing are not what they once were-and that's a good thing, according to award-winning author and critic Clive James. Since serving as television columnist for the London Observer from 1972 to 1982, James has witnessed a radical change in content, format, and programming, and in the very manner in which TV is watched. Here he examines this unique cultural revolution, providing a brilliant, eminently entertaining analysis of many of the medium's most notable twenty-first-century accomplishments and their not always subtle impact on modern society-including such acclaimed serial dramas as Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Mad Men, and The Sopranos, as well as the comedy 30 Rock. With intelligence and wit, James explores a television landscape expanded by cable and broadband and profoundly altered by the advent of Netflix, Amazon, and other "cord-cutting" platforms that have helped to usher in a golden age of unabashed binge-watching.

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.

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.

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.

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books Collected here for the first time are the final two volumes of Clive James's million-copy selling autobiographical 'Unreliable Memoirs' series: North Face of Soho and The Blaze of Obscurity. Newly married and graduated from the cloistered world of Cambridge academia, these volumes see Clive attempt to make his mark on Literary London, writing poems, plays, and criticism, brushing shoulders with the rich and famous, and fitfully attempting to secure a regular income. True stardom, however, soon awaits on television, as the launch of Clive James on TV results in Clive becoming one of the most recognizable faces on British television in the 80s and 90s. We follow him as he interviews Hefner and Hepburn, sends 'Postcards' from Kenya, Shanghai, and Dallas, and - of course - delights in Margarita Pracatan's unique cover versions of pop hits. Taking you behind the scenes of his years on television, and charting the course of his remarkable career, this is memoir-writing at its sharpest and most entertaining, and a fitting conclusion to a classic series. The Complete Unreliable Memoirs: Volume Two is the culmination 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 One and Cultural Amnesia.

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.

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.

Clive goes to Pembroke College, Cambridge to study. Here he joined the Footlights review, participated in film reviewing, wrote poetry and fell in love on several occasions. The book also details his period as a literary editor of "Granta", the articles he wrote for "The New Statesman" and the period when he took Footlights to the Edinburgh Fringe. Then during May week, which was not only in June but was two weeks long, he married. This book follows "Unreliable Memoirs" and "Falling Towards England". Clive James has published two novels, "Brilliant Creatures" and "The Remake", four books of literary criticism and four mock-epic poems.

The poetry of Clive James has been delighting readers and winning awards for decades. His recent poems looking back over his extraordinarily rich life have brought him an even wider readership; some, such as "Japanese Maple" (first published in The New Yorker), became global news events upon their publication. In this first collected volume of poetry, James makes his own selection from over fifty years' work in verse: from his early satires to his late poems of valediction, he proves himself to be as well-suited to the intense demands of the short lyric as to those of the comic excursion. Collected Poems places James's effortless fluency, his breath-taking thematic range, and his emotional power on full display-and will burnish his reputation as one of the most accomplished of our contemporary poets.

Taking us from Fleet Street to Clive James on TV, from Russian department stores to Paris fashion shows via fatherhood, some killer bees, and a satire starring Anne Robinson as Mrs Thatcher, North Face of Soho is the larger-than-life story of a life lived to the full.It's not just that he writes a lot, but that he writes with intense perfectionism, and delivers his gags with honed elegance - Sunday Times. One of the most rewarding aspects of this exuberant work is James' willingness to reveal the backstage mechanics of his professional life. This book is enormously entertaining - Sunday Telegraph. 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 four volumes now in existence are too few. If the final tally puts him up there with Marcel Proust, so much the better - FT Magazine. I feel I know more about the author after reading it than I gleaned from all of his other books put together. This is a book about hard-earned self-knowledge. What makes it funny is quite how hard the self-knowledge was to earn - William Leith, Evening Standard.

"Few people read Poetry any more, but I still wish to write its seedlings down, if only for the lull of gathering: no less a harvest season for being the last time," writes Clive James in his epic poem, The River in the Sky. What emerges from this lamentation is a soaring epic of exceptional depth and overwhelming feeling, all the more extraordinary given its appearance in an age when the heroic poem seems to have disappeared from contemporary literature. Among James's many talents is his uncanny ability to juxtapose references to early twentieth-century poets with "offbeat humor and flyaway cultural observations" (Dwight Garner, New York Times), or allusions to the adagio of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony contrasted with references to "YouTube's vast cosmopolis." Whether recalling his Australian childhood or his father's "clean white headstone" in a Hong Kong cemetery, James's autobiographical epic ultimately helps us define the meaning of life.

Always Unreliable is the collected first three volumes of Clive James's eloquently witty autobiographies, Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England and May Week Was in June. In Unreliable Memoirs we meet the young Clive James - dressed in shorts and growing up in post-war Sydney. With Falling Towards England, we find Clive living in a Swiss Cottage B&B, where he practises the Twist, anticipates poetical masterpieces he's yet to compose, and worries about his wardrobe. Finally, May Week Was In June sees Clive at Cambridge University, where he enthusiastically involves himself in college life (generally female lives) until May Week - not only in June but also a fortnight long - when he gets married. The rest, of course, is history . . .

An esteemed literary critic shares his final musings on books, his children, and his own impending death In 2010, Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that "if you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do," James moved his library to his house in Cambridge, where he would "live, read, and perhaps even write." James is the award-winning author of dozens of works of literary criticism, poetry, and history, and this volume contains his reflections on what may well be his last reading list. A look at some of James's old favorites as well as some of his recent discoveries, this book also offers a revealing look at the author himself, sharing his evocative musings on literature and family, and on living and dying. As thoughtful and erudite as the works of Alberto Manguel, and as moving and inspiring as Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture and Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club, this valediction to James's lifelong engagement with the written word is a captivating valentine from one of the great literary minds of our time.