Showing results by narrator "Clive James" in All Categories

From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, 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.

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.

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.

Joe Orton was among the towering geniuses of 1960s theatre. His life was tragically cut short in 1967, but he left behind him a handful of shocking and scabrous black comedies that will live on in the public imagination for years to come. Featured here are two of his lesser-known works, The Erpingham Camp and The Ruffian on the Stair, collected together as a double bill.

An entertaining drama based on Nye Bevan’s race to create the new NHS by 5 July 1948. Getting Better is a roller coaster period drama based on real political events alongside the fictional story of front-line tears, trauma and triumph at The Park Hospital in Manchester. As Bevan faces up to the establishment in Parliament, Dr Eva Callaway faces the same challenges – facing poverty, sexism and homophobia in a system stuck in the past.

The second volume of Clive James poetry, following on from The Poems from the Book of my Enemy. Following the publication of his 1986 collection, Other Passports, Clive James has emerged as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, going on to publish new works in such mainstream outlets as the TLS, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, The New Yorker, and the Australian Book Review, and now culminating in this updated collection.

The poetry of Clive James achieved immediate notoriety on the publication of this volume's title poem: 'The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered'. Hilarious and self-satirizing, it became one of the most anthologized poems of recent times. After its publication, James emerged unarguably as one of the most prominent poets of his generation – and The Book of My Enemy shows why. With its broad thematic scope and dazzling technical accomplishment, this collection is one to treasure.