Product Description

Literary critic, cultural commentator, TV personality, journalist, poet, political analyst, satirist and Formula One fan: Clive James is a man (and master) of many talents, and the essays collected here are testament to that fact. Whether discussing Bing Crosby, Bruno Schulz or Shakespeare, he manages to prioritise style and substance simultaneously, his tone never less than pitch-perfect, his argument always considered. With each phrase carefully crafted and each piece offering cause for thought, the resulting volume -- which takes the reader from London to Bali, theatre to library, from pre-election campaigning to sitting in front of the TV at home, watching The Sopranos and The West Wing -- is remarkable not only for its range and insight, but also its intimacy and honesty.

‘Clive James realised early on that a quick wit needs to be harnessed to a patient hand if the writer is going to please anyone other than himself, and set about polishing his sentences until they gleamed . . . You’d hate him if you didn’t enjoy reading him so much’ Daily Telegraph

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107723 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 367 pages

Guardian
People read James's essays because to do so is...fun.

Sunday Times
'These insightful essays cover subjects as diverse as the
Holocaust and Bing Crosby...his brilliantly argued essay utterly
convinces'

From the Back Cover

'Sandwiched between two dissections of the difference between celebrity and recognition are stylish analyses of writers from Philip Larkin to Philip Roth, celebrations of The West Wing and The Sopranos and even a lament for the decline of Formula One motor-racing. What unites them is James's distinctive tone and his ability to combine seriousness of intent with the fluency and wit for which he is best known' Sunday Times

Literary critic, cultural commentator, TV documentary film maker, journalist, novelist, poet, political analyst, satirist and Formula One fan: Clive James is a man (and master) of many talents. A contemporary everyman, he is also unmistakably himself, and The Meaning of Recognition – which takes the reader from London to Bali, from the theatre to the library, from pre-election campaigning to sitting at home watching tv – shows him at his most intelligent, insightful, honest and heartfelt.

'Clive James, the most glorious prose stylist of his generation, refuses to stop learning ever more about the world' New Statesman, Books of the Year

'Wonderful stuff: yet more evidence of James's vast and learned sanity, piquantly expressed . . . The subjects are startlingly varied but the tone is constant: erudite, engaged and engaging, and invariably glazed with wit' Daily Telegraph

Customer Reviews

The memory man
Does anyone know more about anything than Clive James knows about everything? He puts me in mind of Dickens's Mr Dombey who:

seemed, at every stride he took, to look about him as though he were saying, `Can anybody have the goodness to indicate any subject, in any direction, on which I am uninformed? I rather think not.

But CJ writes so well you forgive him his omniscience. His genius is to evoke and illuminate works from any field of human culture and, whether he delights in it or thinks it is a turkey, to dazzle you with his brilliantly realised insights and startling similes. He assigns daring and unfamiliar functions and roles to words which, as if tired of their quotidian workload, they joyfully embrace, ecstatic about being asked to broach subjects beyond their bog-standard range, and to repay the debt with a bravura performance, dancing off the page and pirouetting around the mind of the reader. You want to read the book, listen to the music, watch the film - whatever piece of work he is exploring, you needs must explore it too, with his ideas in mind. From Australian poets you've never heard of - Philip Hodgkins, David Malouf, through an obscure Pole, murdered by the Nazis, whose sole work consists of two slim volumes of short stories and up to the best (and worst) of popular entertainment - the Sopranos, Bing Crossby, Big Brother, CJ captures them all, pins them to the wall and lets us understand how they work - or do not work - their magic.
Bing Crossby for example;

was the man on the spot when the microphones got good enough to be canoodled with, as if they had hair to be stroked. .....as if the microphone could hear him think. (His voice) had a tenor top to it, conferring the precious gift of allowing him to relax into the upper register. ....What counts is the capacity to negotiate the tricky intervals, and Bing could do an instantaneous octave jump that left the second note ringing as clear and open as the first. (p83)

From an analysis of the singer to the actor - here's CJ on Tom Courteney playing Philip Larkin in a one man performance:

Courtenay retains a hint of the stammer, but uses it as a device for varying the pace and emphasis... While making every poem flow like spontaneous utterance, Courtenay was careful to respect the punctuation, which includes the line endings, each of them doubling as the phantom comma that a thespian in quest of conversational naturalism typically leaves out. Courtenay's respect for syntax was immaculate, sometimes to the point of pedantry. (p93, p94)

Discussing the content of this show CJ artfully displays his prodigious memory:

The prose was cunningly spliced together from articles, interviews and letters. I could spot nothing that had been posthumously invented for the occasion. (p93)

Clearly our reviewer has read and remembered everything Larkin has written or is recorded as saying. But he modestly underplays this: he continues:

This was a mercy, because it would have stood out like a Big Mac at the Last Supper. (p93)

So even you or I would have noticed any invention in Courtenay's exposition of Larkin's prose. And don't you just adore the juxtaposition of the crass, secular modern and the venerable, holy ancient in that last simile?
In a review of a biography of Pushkin, CJ demonstrates that he has read not only all of Pushkin's works and every other biography of the man, but every word ever written about him in passing by every major writer. For good measure he considers the value of different translations and how well they reflect the original Russian (of which of course CJ is a fluent reader).
Into his capacious brain CJ has crammed, we infer, all of Shakespeare, by heart:

At gunpoint I would have to say that the study of Shakespeare shouldn't end with merely memorizing what he wrote:....But it certainly should begin there. (p133)

Thankfully later in the book (in a piece I cannot now trace) the memory man allows that when he says by heart, he does not mean that he can recite it word perfectly; merely that he knows the work well enough to recognise where any quotation comes from. We also learn that though he can read many languages, duffer that he is, he is unable to speak them.
But where, one wonders, does he find the time to absorb all this learning. He tells us that he spends every evening watching back to back DVDs of The West Wing or The Sopranos (and presumably all other acclaimed American TV series). And we recall that he has been an omnivorous consumer of television ever since the early seventies when he began his decade long stint as the Observer's TV critic.
Clive James is a cultural phenomenon in his own right and we mortals, who are endowed with weaker intellects and less prodigious memories, despair when we compare his super human faculties to our own meagre capacities. At the same time we are grateful to him: grateful because in his lucid expositions he compels us to believe that we too can appreciate great art and literature. More than this he flatters us by taking it as a given that we do or will do. The fulsome delight in all human culture which we find in all of his essays sends us off to the originals determined to avail ourselves of at least some of that pleasure.