The Blaze Of Obscurity

Download or read book The Blaze of Obscurity: Unreliable Memoirs Book 5 written by Clive James and published by Picador. This book was released on 2009-09-16 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many people, Clive James will always be a TV presenter first and foremost, and a writer second -- this despite the fact that his adventures with the written word took place before, during and after his time on the small screen. Nevertheless, for those who remember clips of Japanese endurance gameshows and Egyptian soap operas, Clive reinventing the news or interviewing Hefner and Hepburn, Polanski and Pavarotti, Clive's 'Postcards' from Kenya, Shanghai and Dallas, or Clive James Racing Driver, Clive's rightful place does seem to be right there -- on the box, in our homes, and almost one of the family. However you think of him, though, and whatever you remember him for, The Blaze of Obscurity is perhaps Clive's most brilliant book yet. Part Clive James on TV and part Clive James on TV, it tells the inside story of his years in television, shows Clive on top form both then and now, and proves -- once and for all -- that Clive has a way with words ... whatever the medium.

Download or read book Unreliable Memoirs written by Clive James and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-05-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly 30 years ago, James wrote a refreshingly candid book that made no claims to be accurate, precise, or entirely truthful, only to entertain. Long unavailable in the U.S., "Unreliable Memoirs" is being made available to American readers.

Download or read book North Face of Soho written by Clive James and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Fleet Street to the television, North Face of Soho is the fascinating and hilarious fourth volume of memoir from much-loved author, poet and broadcaster Clive James. '[James] delivers his gags with honed elegance' – Sunday Times It is 1968. Newly married, dressed in the style of the times ('a frenzy of bad judgement'), Clive James is leaving the cloistered world of Cambridge academia and setting his sights once again on the lights of literary London. Luckily for him and us, this crack at the big city would go rather better than last time. Still writing songs, directing sketch shows and trying to break into the movie business, with very mixed success, Clive eventually lands a weekly TV column at the Observer, finds his metier and rapidly becomes a household name. Credited with inventing a genre, Clive turns his attention to the previously critically disregarded medium of television to comment on the entire culture. Through the Seventies and early Eighties, from Fleet Street to Hollywood, from Russian department stores to Paris fashion shows, this is the hilarious, entertaining and honest story of a life lived to the full. North Face of Soho is the fourth book of memoir from Clive James. Continue his story with The Blaze of Obscurity.

Download or read book Latest Readings written by Clive James and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author reflects on his latest readings, and re-readings, undertaken after being diagnosed with terminal leukemia, combining thoughts on old favorites and new discoveries with personal musings on living and dying.

Download or read book Play All written by Clive James and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A loving and breezy set of essays” on today’s most addictive TV shows from “an incisive and hilarious critic” (Slate). Television is not what it once was. Award-winning author and critic Clive James spent decades covering the medium, and 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 television’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 and 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. “James loves television, he loves the winding stories it tells and that we share them together. Play All is a late love letter to the medium of our lives.”—Sunday Times “Large-brained and largehearted, and written with astonishing energy.”—The New York Times Book Review “Witty and insightful musing on popular and critically acclaimed series of the past two decades.”—Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Unreliable Memoirs written by Clive James and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first instalment of his famed autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs is a hilarious and touching introduction to the life of the author, broadcaster, critic and poet, Clive James. 'It is one of the most tender, frank and, above all, funny accounts of growing up I have ever read' –Michael Parkinson 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, the local wildlife, and an overwhelming desire to be a superhero, Clive's adventures growing up in the suburbs of post-war Sydney are a hair-raising and uproarious evocation of a lost world. 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 . . . 'James cannot find it within himself to write a dull paragraph' – The Times With an introduction from P.J. O'Rourke, journalist, satirist and author of Holidays in Hell. Unreliable Memoirs is the first book of memoir from Clive James. Continue his story with Falling Towards England.

Download or read book Cultural Amnesia written by Clive James and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 875 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. 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’s 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 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.