It's like one of those children's picture books where you turn the page and find yourself in an alternative universe. Turn the corner of the bar in the Westbury Hotel and there he is, exactly as he used to be on the television, complete with devilish grin, Aussie accent and snazzy line in wisecracks, most of which he aims at himself.
The man who has done a million interviews is doing another one. Except that, in this universe, he's answering the questions. So, Clive James, television talk-show host extraordinaire, which is easier: being an interviewer or being an interviewee?
"Oh, being interviewed is much easier. Jonathan Miller once said his idea of heaven would be to be interviewed on television continuously, forever. I wouldn't go that far, but I'm rarely lost for words."
He grins the famous grin. That's putting it mildly. At 62, James talks faster than an AK47. Blink and he's on to the next topic - or the one after. "On my shows I was a very soft interviewer. I never was adversarial, never interviewed politicians or anything like that. But interviewing celebrities is getting harder and harder, because celebrities say less and less. They say only what's in the script.
"The real secret is to listen. When I started I made the classic mistake of all beginners - I didn't listen to the answer, because I was too busy trying to think of my next question. And if you ask the question, 'So what happened in your last year of school?' and the answer is, 'I murdered my mother,' your next question should not be, 'And then, I suppose, you went to university?' But I got better at it."
There weren't many mother-murderers on The Late Clive James, Saturday Night Clive, Sunday Night Clive, Monday Night Clive or any of his other small-screen incarnations. But there were plenty of surprises, and not just for the audience.
"One night the producer came to me and said: 'We've got a problem with Tony Curtis.' I said: 'What's the problem?' He said: 'Well, he won't come out of his dressing room. We're not even sure he's in there. When you open the door it's dark - but we can hear someone breathing.' I went into the room and, sure enough, I could hear someone breathing. So I took a deep breath and said: 'Mr Curtis, some people think that you've been in three of the greatest movies ever made. I think that you've been in four of the greatest movies ever made.' There was a pause and then he said: 'Clive, I think you and I are going to get on.' "
Curtis turned out to be a great guest. "He just got frightened. A lot of actors get frightened when they have to be themselves. I had one guest who was so neurotic that he was incoherent - an American actor whose name I won't mention, although he did play Batman at one stage, and he even made Batman neurotic. But that doesn't mean that actors are dumb, as a class - some of them are very bright."
Didn't James hanker after an acting career, having been involved with the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s? "Oh, very, very much. But I have no talent. I only have one role, which is as Clive James, and it never varies. George Harrison, whom I knew and liked very much, ran an outfit called Handmade Films, and he once told me that Bob Hoskins was getting offered every gangster role in the world, and he couldn't possibly play them all, so there was a gap in the market for anyone with a thick neck and a bald head. Would I like to try it? I said: 'You bet I would.' Sadly, it never happened. I had visions of myself in the back of a limo, rolling down the window, leaning out and threatening somebody. I would have been very good at that."
If there's a problem with Clive James, it's perhaps that he's good at too many things. He spent years as the Observer's TV critic before moving to the other side of the camera. Then there were the talk shows, a clutch of travel documentaries and the annual New Year's Eve reviews, which, he says, took from August to December to produce and became a chore. But he has also written four novels, seven volumes of poetry, three volumes of autobiography and 13 volumes of criticism and essays. His "serious" writing tends to attract oddly vituperative reviews, in which the "pretentious" crops up a lot.
"Sometimes, when people can't get you in a box, they don't like it - especially journalists. I'm a journalist myself, so I can say this. Journalists get quite angry if they can't find out what kind of butterfly you are, then put the pin in. They think I'm trying to pull a fast one. I'm not. I've always liked the kind of writer who wrote in different fields. There was a lot of that in Vienna in 1938, for example - writers who wrote sketches, performed in cabaret, wrote books of criticism, books of philosophy. I once wrote a book called The Dreaming Swimmer, which had some speeches in it, some critical articles and some poems. The publisher published it, but the bookshop didn't know where to put it. That can be a real problem in bookshops. I did a book of essays called Snake Charmers In Texas. It shows up in sections on snake-charming, it shows up in the geography section, but it never shows up under literary criticism."
When Unreliable Memoirs appeared, in 1980, it was an instant critical and commercial success. Twenty years on, it's as fresh and as funny as ever - vintage James - which is no doubt why it has now been republished, together with volumes two and three of his life story, as a single volume: Always Unreliable.
Open it at random and the range of references is striking. On a Sydney school-yard craze known as "dongers", James notes that "the brawls looked like the battle of Thermopylae". Earlier in the same chapter, Norman Rockwell, Turgenev and Bakunin, John Stuart Mill, Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontδs all appear on a single page, and the book is prefaced by a quotation from The Iliad that describes the devastating effect of the death of a husband and father. He nods approvingly at the mention of Homer. "A great piece, isn't it? 'This city shall be overthrown. For you are gone, you who kept watch over it.' "
James's father died when he was five. A soldier who had gone missing in Japan after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, he was finally located and, courtesy of the US military, put on a plane back to Australia. But the plane crashed in Manila Bay, with the loss of everyone on board.
Does he remember his father's death? "Vividly. My mother got the telegram and collapsed. I couldn't do anything to help - and it marked me for life."
In the two decades since it was first published, Unreliable Memoirs has gone through 55 editions and sold a million copies. "Which means," explains its author, flashing a particularly cheeky grin, "that I've always been pretty much able to publish what I like, because the publisher thinks, 'Well, he may have another hit.' But I've got a feeling that I did start something. I think I actually started the personal memoir that doesn't pretend to tell the whole truth, but only hints at it - and, also, is meant to be an entertainment. You massage the facts a bit so they come out entertaining. I've actually started a whole new genre of lying, when you think about it."
A book from 20 years ago, TV shows from the 1980s . . . you might be forgiven for wondering what James does nowadays - sit at home and knit? You got the first part right. He makes television programmes in his living room.
"For a number of years, I found mainstream television increasingly frustrating, because the requirements of the executives are changing. They want a wide audience. They wanted me to talk to Geri Halliwell - and they're right, because when you talk to Geri Halliwell, the viewing figures do go up by a million people. But I wanted to do something else."
So now he talks to anyone he likes - Martin Amis, say, or Julian Barnes or Cate Blanchett. He has already sold the first 12 programmes to Artsworld, Jeremy Isaac's specialist TV channel, and hopes to broadcast them shortly on his website, at www.welcomestranger.com. He is also putting the finishing touches to a book called Alone In The Cafe - half essays, half philosophy. "When I finish that I'm going to write a tango musical opera. I'm going to dance in it - I may even sing in it." A keen tango merchant, he travels to Argentina once a year for lessons. "And then I'll probably settle down and write a novel about the war in the Pacific, which will probably be in four or five volumes."
Anything else, before we run off the bottom of the page? He counts on stubby fingers. "Well, let's see: I've plugged the website and the book, and I told you about the tour - didn't I?" Actually, no. But he does, and double quick. In March he will tour the UK with Pete Atkin, a songwriting partner from 30 years ago, with whom he recorded a clutch of CDs. "What are the songs about? Oh, the collapse of civilisation and the agony of lost love - and sometimes they're not even as funny as that."
Ladies and gentlemen, Clive James.
Always Unreliable is published by Picador, £12.99 in UK