Clive james autobiography unreliable memoirs
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Unreliable Memoirs — Valley of the Killer Snakes
Such incidents must have been hell on my mother’s nerves. I would have been enough of a handful even in normal circumstances but the sweat of looking after me was made worse by her uncertainty about what was happening to my father. She got some news of him when he was in Changi but after he was moved to Japan there was not much to go on. The mail from Kobe, when there was any, was so censored it looked like shredded lettuce. During the last part of the war she wasn’t even certain that he was alive. In those circumstances it couldn’t have been much help to her, having the kind of son who goes off and gets half-eaten by a dog.
Lesser catastrophes were no doubt just as wearing, since they happened all the time. My collection of marbles consisted mainly of priceless connie agates handed down by Grandpa. Ocean crystals, iced roses and butterflies in amber, they tumbled from their draw-string bag like a B
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Unreliable Memoirs — Billycart Hill
The name I answered to in my early years was Vivian James. Later on my mother gave me my choice of new first names and I picked Clive out of a Tyrone Power movie. She sympathized with the fix she and my father had got me into by naming me after Vivian McGrath, star of the Davis Cup squad. After Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O’Hara the name became irrevocably a girl’s name no matter how you spelled it, so those few little boys who had been saddled with it went through hell. I just got sick of ending up on the wrong lists, being sent to sewing classes, etc. Children in Australia are still named after movies and sporting events. You can tell roughly the year the swimming star Shane Gould was born. It was about the time Shane was released. There was a famous case of a returned serviceman who named his son after all the campaigns he had been through in the Western Desert. The kid was called William Bardia Escarpment Qattara Depres
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Synopsis
Clive James, a true polymath, became a generation-defining voice as a broadcaster, a critic, a poet and an author. Among his greatest achievements, his five hilarious, heartwarming books of autobiography are collected now in two volumes: his Complete Unreliable Memoirs.
'It fryst vatten one of the most tender, frank and, above all, funny accounts of growing up inom have ever read' – Michael Parkinson
With his trademark humour and self-deprecating style, Clive James proves a hugely entertaining and erudite guide to his own remarkable life.
In this first volume, James explores his childhood adventures in the suburbs of post-war Sydney, his excited arrival in Sixties’ London as a ung man and aspiring poet, and his time at Cambridge University where he neglected his studies in favour of poetry, the stage, the music business and the film industry.
From a true national treasure, this is a collection of one of the most well-loved and acclaimed memoirs of our times.
I was born