After Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, and May Week Was in June comes the next instalment in the ongoing saga that is Clive James's life. 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 spring day in 1968, 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.
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"beautiful, deeply funny and of course clever. always a lesson in how to write well the best thing james does in this one is he talks quite a bit about how he does it.
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Toby (4 out of 5 stars)