Books June 2003
A nose for the bogus
A review of As of this Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002, by Clive James.
The subtitle of As of This Writing, Clive Jamess new collection of literary and cultural criticism, is The Essential Essays, 19682002.[1] It would be easy to condemn the adjective as hubristic: essential to whom? one might ask. But in fact the forty-seven pieces presented here, which deal with cultural icons ranging from Philip Larkin and Bertrand Russell to Germaine Greer and Federico Fellini, are of a remarkably high level and might without undue hyperbole be called essentialif not to the general reader then at least to the educated one. Good literary critics (and most of these essays are about literature) are rare, and, while Jamess enormous output, over a forty-year career that has included long stints as a television performer and critic, has inevitably produced lots of ephemera, his longer essays on subjects he...
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