Book description
'Somebody once said that a trilogy ought ideally to consist of two
volumes. Unfortunately he never said anything else, so his name is
forgotten.' Falling Towards England, the second volume of Clive James'
Unreliable Memoirs, was meant to be the last. Thankfully it is not. When
we last met our hero he was living a hand-to-mouth existence while
London was swinging its way into the Sixties. Pembroke College,
Cambridge offered a way out, if not up. Here Clive threw himself into
Footlights, film reviewing, writing poetry, falling in love (often),
anything so long as it wasn't on the curriculum. He became literary
editor of Granta, wrote for the New Statesman, took Footlights to the
Edinburgh Fringe, and worked on Expresso Drongo , arguably the worst
film ever screened at the NFT. Then during May Week, which was not only
in June but was two weeks long, he married . . . and most of the rest is
history. Inevitably sharp and always outrageously funny, Clive James is
perhaps the most brilliant on the subject he knows best: himself.
'James, in an equivocal and not necessarily disparaging sense of the
world, is a conceited writer, the Cleveland of modern English prose,
every line propelled by a firecracker witticism . . . It's a funny book'
Frank Kermode, London Review of Books 'Nobody writes like Clive James;
he has invented a style' Spectator 'In his prose, he can turn phrases,
mix together cleverness and clownishness, and achieve a fluency and a
level of wit that make his pages truly shimmer . . . May Week Was In
June is vintage James' Financial Times Clive James is the author
of more than twenty books, including collections of essays, literary and
television criticism, travel writing, novels and verse, plus his famous
'unreliable memoirs'. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of
Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal
for literature.
