“Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead. There is no author's name on the title page, merely a modest line of italic type advising us that Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's 'short biography' has been composed 'by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee.' This is the one statement in the entire opus which is undeniably true. Only an Institute could write like this.”

— Clive James

'Brezhnev: A State of Boredom'
Opening lines of his review of the Brezhnev: A Short Biography
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Clive James 151

Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator an… 1939–2019

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Clive James 151

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