Clive James: Man

“The running gag of the Grand Prix series is that whereas Murray [Walker], safe in the commentary box, sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.”

Clive James

'Hot pistils'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

Men , Cars , Box

“A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.”

Clive James

Ernesto Sábato
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Love , Dance

“After half a lifetime of poking fun at Bernard Shaw's materialism Kingsmill was not above touching the despised sage for ten quid. Even in the Australian school of literary morals, we weren't allowed to slag a man and put the bit on him simultaneously: it had to be one or the other.”

Clive James

'Richard Ingrams at Doubting Castle'
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

School

“For the educated man, there is a moment of his early acquaintanceship with Dante when he realizes that all he has slowly taught himself to enjoy in poetry is everything that Dante has grown out of.”

Clive James

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

Education

“[In Marcel Ophuls' film The Memory of Justice] Mad old Nazis were to be heard deploring modern decadence. 'The difference is, we weren't obsessed with smut,' said one comfortable, retired SS man, all unaware of being up to his neck in blood and pus.”

Clive James

'The Weld This Week'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

Justice , Memory , Madness

“There is abundant evidence in Stoppard’s plays to show that he is as capable of emotion as anybody. In Enter A Free Man Linda is a finely tuned moral invention whose equivalents we might well miss in the later plays, if we really thought they should be there. The mainspring of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the perception—surely a compassionate one—that the fact of their deaths mattering so little to Hamlet was something which ought to have mattered to Shakespeare.”

Clive James

'Tom Stoppard: Count Zero Splits the Infinite'
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

Death , Dead

“…I never got away from the enigma of Coren's personality. For me he remains the most enigmatic man of his generation, because the sprawling palace of his attainments has so many rooms he has scarcely bothered to look into. He can fly planes, drive fast cars, dance accomplished jive, speak perfect German. But who is he? His writing never tells you, because its humour is a shield.”

Clive James

On Alan Coren, p. 166
Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006)

Cars , Dance , Personality , Perfection

“It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.”

Clive James

Memoirs, Falling Towards England (1985)

People , Shoe , Thinking , Sport

“We tend to think of [Hitler] as an idiot because the central tenet of his ideology was idiotic – and idiotic, of course, it transparently is. Anti-Semitism is a world view through a pinhole: as scientists say about a bad theory, it is not even wrong. Nietzsche tried to tell Wagner that it was beneath contempt. Sartre was right for once when he said that through anti-Semitism any halfwit could become a member of an elite. But, as the case of Wagner proves, a man can have this poisonous bee in his bonnet and still be a creative genius. Hitler was a destructive genius, whose evil gifts not only beggar description but invite denial, because we find it more comfortable to believe that their consequences were produced by historical forces than to believe that he was a historical force. Or perhaps we just lack the vocabulary. Not many of us, in a secular age, are willing to concede that, in the form of Hitler, Satan visited the Earth, recruited an army of sinners, and fought and won a battle against God. We would rather talk the language of pseudoscience, which at least seems to bring such events to order. But all such language can do is shift the focus of attention down to the broad mass of the German people, which is what Goldhagen has done, in a way that, at least in part, lets Hitler off the hook – and unintentionally reinforces his central belief that it was the destiny of the Jewish race to be expelled from the Volk as an inimical presence.”

Clive James

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

God , People , Age , World

“One of [Mann's] many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was.”

Clive James

'Thomas Mann', p. 453
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Hate

“Speer never made the mistake of saying there were no extermination camps. He said he didn't know about them. He impressed the gullible by declaring himself willing to accept responsibility for Nazi crimes even though he was not aware of their full scope. But as the man better informed about the Reich's industrial resources than anybody else including Hitler, Speer was in fact fully aware of the purpose and the extent of the Final Solution and by pretending he was not he did the opposite of accepting responsibility.”

Clive James

'Speer Checks Out'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

“Perry [Como] gave his usual impersonation of a man who has simultaneously been told to say 'Cheese' and shot in the back with a poisoned arrow.”

Clive James

'Olde Rubbishe'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

“The sure sign of a weak man who ascends to glory is that he can't tolerate having strong men around him.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006), p. 126

Men , Strong

“In The Bob Hope Golf Classic (LWT) the participation of President Gerald Ford was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service.”

Clive James

'Blinding white flash'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

Hope

“When the bell rang to start the Italian hunting season, devotees of la caccia drove at full speed into the woods and shot everything that moved. Since the animals were sensibly lying low, most of the victims were people. Advancing at random through woods, the hunters - whose minds, like their expensive guns, were on a hair trigger - fired when they thought they saw something. Often they had seen each other. They also killed civilians in nearby villages. The occasional animal got hit, but only by a fluke. One man blasted a rabbit that was already hanging from another man's belt. So much vehicular traffic on the woodland roads, however, ensured that a considerable amount of wildlife was run over.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 144

People , Lying , Animals , Speed