Isn't he a clever clogs, that Clive James? Smartest cultural commentator on the Commonwealth block; and that's not bad when you consider he resides in a country which liked to portray his homeland as possessing less culture than yoghurt. Such gibes were the last defence of the imperial overlords against the impertinence of the colonists to grow up with sharper tongues and sharper wits than the inbred parent stock. In his generation, growing up in the 1950s and heading north from the unstimulating suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, were people such as Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Clive himself (let's not forget that middle-class pin-up Rupert Murdoch, either). They went looking for a bigger stage for their ambition, and in some cases for the life of the mind (no irony intended) and found it in an older place, where the life of the body could be subjugated.
The title, Reliable Essays, is a take-off of the first in James's hugely popular autobiographical series, Unreliable Memoirs.
He went from TV critic of the Observer to TV presenter and has always been an accessible, personable presence. Behind that TV faτade was a man who - on the evidence of these essays - speaks more languages than most of us have heard of, and has read more books than repose in the D·n Laoghaire library. James admits, delights in, the fact that he was an omnivorous reader from an early age. In what I found one of the most enjoyable pieces in this collection, a 1975 piece on the contemporary revival of interest in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes' novels, James talks of the delight such books afforded him as a boy. So thoroughly did he read and re-read CD's Professor Challenger stories that "fifty years later I am reminded of it when I pick up something of the same weight".
Conan Doyle was part of a love affair with the written word, and a rigour about its construction, which reveals itself in James's many highly critical comments on the craft, as well as the art, of writing. The architectural precision with which some writers cast their prose is his delight, and the off-the-peg, thrown-together approach of others fills his inkpot with bile. Poor old Steve Alomes, for example. A gentle and very serious academic of my former acquaintance, his effort to write a book on the irresistible lure of the northern hemisphere cerebral hot-spots for Aussies meets Jamesian scorn of the first water. Good heavens, this benighted Alomes stoops to journalism for his references! Can't have that. But it is Alomes's writing style that really gets James's gander: " . . . he writes plain enough English for someone whose ear for rhythm either never developed or was injured in an accident. There are whole paragraphs that don't need to be read twice to yield their sense." Ouch.
Perhaps the project was so offensive to James because Alomes trod on his toes, by analysing him and his motives, and, it seems, accusing him of being that dreaded critter, "the professional Australian" (singlet and belch compulsory). Piqued, James retorts: "I had to compose a few ordinary, unaccented English sentences before I could get anybody's attention." Fair enough, mate.
So many of those sentences have been a delight (though I would take issue with the dustjacket's glazed-eyed claim of "spellbinding prose". Literary luvvieville is also apparent in Julian Barnes's gushing introduction.)
In this collection there is a lovely piece about Margaret Thatcher visiting China. James is good in any mode, but he is really good at being funny. That's what television wanted him for, even if it did end up with rather sad expositions of cheap Japanese hotels. In this 1982 piece his motif is to liken the then prime minister's appearance to various styles of Chinese artefacts.
"She was the Fourth Strong Woman in Chinese history, an invader from the strange kingdom of the Two Queens, in which one Queen stayed at home minding the palace while the other one came marching towards you carrying a severely cut handbag like an Anyang Shang dagger-axe with a jade blade."
He also addresses personalities as diverse as Philip Larkin and Marilyn Monroe in these essays. For my money, the Monroe essay gave much more relish (conclusion: she had no ability to act, sing, or do anything, except wear tight clothes). Larkin was simply a genius. But James's gift is that he knows as much about one as the other: that rare creature, as familiar to prime-time television viewers as to readers of the Times Literary Supplement.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist