Clive James (1939 - 2019) RIP

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50578512

[Joseph K]

I enjoyed reading his autobiographies.

[cloughie]

A genuinely funny man, not many of them left! RIP Clive

[jayne lee wilson]

Lovely man - wonderful poet, cultural commentator, acute analyser of the new Golden Age of TV boxsets....

A brilliant writer who seemed to deny death, perhaps through sheer fierce hedonism, as long as humanly possible;

I was fond of him (in that oddly detached-yet-intimate media way with columnists) and learnt a lot from him......thanks for all of it Clive...:daff2:

[gradus]

Made The Observer worth buying whilst he wrote for it. Thanks for all the laughs.

[muzzer]

Lovely man - wonderful poet, cultural commentator, acute analyser of the new Golden Age of TV boxsets....

A brilliant writer who seemed to deny death, perhaps through sheer fierce hedonism, as long as humanly possible;

I was fond of him (in that oddly detached-yet-intimate media way with columnists) and learnt a lot from him......thanks for all of it Clive...:daff2:

Seconded. A wonderful writer and critic.

[LMcD]

Seconded. A wonderful writer and critic.

It's a sad irony that his book on Larkin - 'Somewhere Becoming Rain' - was chosen as one of the Books Of The Year' in Saturday's Times.

[Richard Tarleton]

Lovely man - wonderful poet, cultural commentator, acute analyser of the new Golden Age of TV boxsets....

Which was your Clive James? I never missed an Observer TV review (he could be wildly wrong - he didn't get Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - "Though not quite as incomprehensible [as the novel] it was equally turgid" - he had a thing about JLeC, he wrote a mocking review of The Honourable Schoolboy in the New York Review of Books) but he was one of the great TV reviewers. I loved his tongue-in-cheek New Years Eve shows with their Man or Woman of the Year - Kylie Minogue, Diana Ross . I didn't get past first base with his poetry (Pergrine Prykke's Pilgrimage, anybody?) nor did I watch his commentaries on Japanese game shows, though as Evan Davies said just now he understood the medium of television as few others. A lovely interview with PJ O'Rourke just now on PM.

He was part of that great art of that great diaspora of Australians who have so added to our cultural life (also Hughes, Greer, Humphries...)

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[Serial_Apologist]

By coincidence I was watching a youtube interview with Jonathan Miller earlier. Here's Pete Atkin singing one of the best-known songs from their collaboration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNReclGbXbw

Reminds one of almost forgotten feelings about the unrequited!

[teamsaint]

On reflection, Clive James probably more than any other writer dragged me ( and certainly a few of my comtemporaries) into the adult world of criticism and commentary.

And we loved watching him, and his special humour.

[Padraig]

And we loved watching him, and his special humour.

Even in writing about Sentenced To Life, 2015, he could not resist a crack at the idea of being invited to read aloud some of his last poems on radio and television: "an offence, perhaps, to those who believe that a poem should be merely overheard, but an unbeatable way of barking for one's act."

[antongould]

On reflection, Clive James probably more than any other writer dragged me ( and certainly a few of my comtemporaries) into the adult world of criticism and commentary.

And we loved watching him, and his special humour.

Exactly ts .... he will be missed .....

[Alison]

He turned out to be quite a survivor. RIP.