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Clive James
Добавлен 12 сен 2017
Talking in the Library Series 4 – Posy Simmonds
Posy Simmonds is to the top-of-the-range British comic strip what Gary Trudeau is to the American equivalent: the exalted benchmark. But Posy's world is a long way from Doonesbury, and far closer to Bloomsbury, although she would be quick to point out that she's more interested in the socially aspiring than in the socially secure. The British genteel would-be intelligentsia, with all its nervous self-confidence and all its lonely self-doubt, is one of her best areas. Her knack for overheard dialogue has led some scientists to contend that her ears revolve and go beep-beep. But perhaps I, like so many writers, praise her words because we don't know how to praise her pictures. Her uncanny g...
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Видео
Talking in the Library Series 4 - Michael Frayn
Просмотров 6 тыс.6 лет назад
Michael Frayn rules at the pinnacle of the unclassifiable. When he writes a book of philosophy, he is a philosopher; when he writes a play, he is a playwright; when he writes a novel, he a novelist. In every category he is somebody’s favourite among modern writers, but what unites his work across all the categories is a linguistic fastidiousness simultaneously both poetic and critical. People w...
Talking in the Library Series 4 - Richard E. Grant
Просмотров 28 тыс.6 лет назад
Richard E. Grant became everybody's favourite British upmarket eccentric actor as the tall one in Withnail and I. Even Hollywood could tell he was from Britain. He was in fact from Swaziland, but that made him more Empire than anybody. Secretly powering his gift for droll comedy was a deep sense of personal unease stemming from his childhood. The story began to surface in his first book of diar...
Talking in the Library Series 4 - Stephen Bayley
Просмотров 1,6 тыс.6 лет назад
Stephen Bayley is the British design guru who takes his vision of industrial creativity into the realm of aesthetics. He isn't automatically convinced by the next twist of fashion in interior decorating and if he doesn't like some overpriced maniac's latest brainwave in moulded plastic furniture he may try to attack it with a road drill. On the other hand nobody is more susceptible to the funct...
Talking in the Library Series 4 - Ronald Harwood
Просмотров 2,4 тыс.6 лет назад
Ronald Harwood came from South Africa to be an actor in London. After a voice-lift at RADA he ended up dressing an actor, Sir Donal Wolfit, and Harwood's play about that experience, The Dresser, established him immediately in the top flight of British theatre, where he continues to rank along with Pinter, Stoppard, Nichols, Frayn, Simon Gray and others. Several of them write screenplays as a su...
Talking in the Library Series 3 - Terry Gilliam
Просмотров 4 тыс.6 лет назад
Terry Gilliam went on from Monty Python to become one of the most original film directors Hollywood has known: sometimes too original for the comfort of the studio bosses. With a piece of paper and a pencil he can create a personal world for four pence. On film he needs millions of dollars, but he spends it to rare effect. Those who believe, as I do, that Brazil is a political film ranking with...
Talking in the Library Series 3 - Howard Jacobson
Просмотров 6 тыс.6 лет назад
Howard Jacobson is one of the most fearless commentators of our time. Shocking and subversively funny, he has a permanently fresh knack for breaking taboos like stale biscuits. In his novels and newspaper columns he is famous for his provocative eloquence, but the surprise is that he talks that way in real life, with an unmatched capacity to put a complex point of view in a string of elegantly ...
Talking in the Library Series 3 - Jung Chang
Просмотров 1,3 тыс.6 лет назад
Jung Chang ranks with Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the author of a great book that dispelled the last illusions about a great tyranny. Wild Swans matches The Gulag Archipelago for its power and horror, with the difference that the personality of its narrator seems so frail. But the frailty is an illusion. She is a tough-minded woman, as the ghost of Mao Zedong is about to find out, because after n...
Talking in the Library Series 3 - Jonathan Miller
Просмотров 21 тыс.6 лет назад
Jonathan Miller started something with Beyond the Fringe but was content to let the next generation try to finish it, although few of them had his gift for penetratingly intelligent humour. He went on to host arts televison programmes and become the most sought-after director of opera in the world. But it was increasingly evident from his several big television series on science that his deeper...
Talking in the Library Series 3 - Ahdaf Soueif
Просмотров 9666 лет назад
Ahdaf Soueif has written two of the most important novels to have come out of Egypt in recent times: The Map of Love and In the Eye of the Sun. Her first concern is the position of Egypt in relation to Britain, the old colonialist power. She has lived the relationship in her own person, as an exile and as a representative of women's liberation in the Islamic world. Her further concern is with t...
Talking in the Library Series 3 - Jeremy Isaacs
Просмотров 2,2 тыс.6 лет назад
Sir Jeremy Isaacs rapidly established himself as the most creative television executive of our time when he green-lighted such revolutionary programmes as Rock Follies and The Naked Civil Servant. He personally launched Channel 4 and shaped its early course. His World at War series set the standards for a genre. As director of the Royal Opera House he got into a war of his own, which he charact...
Talking in the Library Series 2 - Julian Barnes
Просмотров 19 тыс.6 лет назад
Talking in the Library Series 2 - Julian Barnes
Talking in the Library Series 2 - Piers Paul Read
Просмотров 2,8 тыс.6 лет назад
Talking in the Library Series 2 - Piers Paul Read
Talking in the Library Series 2 - P.J. O'Rourke
Просмотров 6 тыс.6 лет назад
Talking in the Library Series 2 - P.J. O'Rourke
Talking in the Library Series 2 - Cate Blanchett
Просмотров 15 тыс.6 лет назад
Cate Blanchett is the dazzling Australian stage and screen star who has gone all the way to fairyland as the princess in Lord of the Rings. In the title role of Elizabeth she was a queen, instantly establishing herself as a regal presence who speaks English as if she had helped to invent it. She makes a speciality of the haughty beauty that can strike men dumb. Relaxing in the library of a dumb...
Talking in the Library Series 2 - Alan Jenkins
Просмотров 2,2 тыс.6 лет назад
Alan Jenkins is one of the outstanding poets of his generation. Starting from a non-Establishment background, he has rapidly become, at an early age, an Establishment figure as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Knowing the field from two opposed angles, as a poet and as the editor who chooses which other poets will be printed in a key journal, he is well qualified to discuss an unusua...
Talking in the Library Series 2 - Simon Callow
Просмотров 9 тыс.6 лет назад
Simon Callow is an eloquent, ebullient combination of screen star, stage actor and writer. In Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shakespeare in Love he showed how a character role could dominate the big screen. In the theatre, his achievements include one-man shows (notably his portrait of Dickens) in which he dominates the stage all on his own. His biographical writings on Orson Welles and Charle...
Talking in the Library Series 2 - Ian McEwan
Просмотров 7 тыс.6 лет назад
Ian McEwan runs at the front of the grid with a generation of British novelists who are always mentioned together, and his international reputation sometimes looks like outstripping even theirs. Amsterdam actually won him the Booker prize but he has been short-listed three times and as far as countless readers are concerned he might as well be just given the trophy to take home. Since I first m...
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Peter Porter
Просмотров 3,8 тыс.6 лет назад
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Peter Porter
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Deborah Bull
Просмотров 1 тыс.6 лет назад
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Deborah Bull
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Olly and Suzi
Просмотров 8 тыс.6 лет назад
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Olly and Suzi
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Martin Amis
Просмотров 60 тыс.6 лет назад
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Martin Amis
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Ruby Wax
Просмотров 3,8 тыс.6 лет назад
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Ruby Wax
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Bruce Beresford
Просмотров 2,6 тыс.6 лет назад
Talking in the Library Series 1 - Bruce Beresford
She makes a speciality of the haughty beauty that can strike men dumb. Relaxing in the library of a dumb admirer, she proves wonderfully down to earth. my thoughts exactly
Imagine in a time when intelligent discourse had a place on television
Absolute class
The smugness is off the scale!
That both of these supposed literary giants didn’t read Voyage au bout de la nuit is both ridiculous and cowardly
style gone mad....
james lived to 80 yo. amis only 73.
I can listen her for hours. So I pleasurably do
What year was this
my favorite actress a star 🌟 that shines💎🌟🇧🇷💜
Admire both writers! I like that Amis defends Borges from James’ attack on his character and supposed complicity (“Cultural Amnesia”) indeed, he was much more forgiving of his fellow writers than James. Today, we can only imagine two blokes publicly guffawing at the fellatio scene in “Portnoy’s Complaint”, how ironic they then moved on to the subject of censorship.
The idea of a man of Amis' accomplishments critiquing a man of Joyce's is laughable.
By that standard who is permitted to criticise a titan such as Joyce? Perhaps half a dozen are on his level and they're all dead.
@@QwidgyboManyeh that was a bizarre comment. By that logic there’d be no such thing as criticism
@@QwidgyboManAnd many of them also viewed Joyce's 'masterpieces' unfavourably. Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley spring to mind first, even Nabokov another great stylist, but I would need to reconfirm his views as it's been awhile.
O
Thank you for uploading this series!
what year was this?
Suzi is beautiful. Her work is amazing
👍
Wagner was a genius composer but a failed dramatist -- not a single sympathetic character in any of his works, his texts are dreadful, his plots are basically buffo opera slowed to funeral march tempos, and the 'philosophical' content just a tutti frutti of odds ands ends bunged in and unresolved.
fellartio
He took his father's opinion very much on board, maybe too much. That you don't mimic the pronunciation of other languages if you're speaking English.
@@ianparker9231 but in doing so, is entirely mispronouncing the word...thus making him look rather silly billy in the process.
Martin references this in his memoir Experience funnily enough. That his Father always used to pronounce words in a rather peculiar way that as kids they could never understand. One day they asked Kingsley and he talked about not relying on spelling pronunciation and instead speaking words according to their natural rhythms. He considered it the posh or upper-class way of speaking. Martin does his too, a great deal.
After reading and watching him in such interviews over the years, I now feel as if I have lost a friend. RIP
I never knew fellatio and rococo are pronounced like that. Wonderful discussion.
They aren't
@@arthurriordan5760 they are, in Italy
It's upto you. I've always pronounced it like fell-eh-shio
My Struggle. 😂
It occurs to me that MA never seems more content than in the company of other writers. This is a delicious half hour.
RIP Martin Amis.
Farewell to an old and better world
Nadezhda Mandelshdam never wrote a good book. I disagree.
Barnes is a fine speaker but his works, after History of the World, are trivial. I know “The Sense of Ending” won the Booker but I thought a slight work at best
😂 if YOU say so…
Poor Jools, he’ll be gutted.
It's amazing how many mannerisms he shares here with C Hitchens. They do say that people begin to behave like each other when they spend time together.
They really were Very close, d'you follow me?
They both died of esophageal cancer 😔
Кейт Бланшетт лучшая галадриэль
Imagine basing your entire world-view on the opinion of imaginary friends. How can it be ‘unfair’ to criticise the Catholic Church for burning people at the stake, how it can by any less wrong simply because others did it?
I don’t think Oxford or Cambridge automatically makes better authors. Both seem to breed arrogance and dimwitery.
She mentions her love for Liv Ullman at 3:12 and how amazing that in 2009, Cate asked Ullman to direct her in A Street Car Named Desire, considered to be one of her best stage performances. Amazing how things manifest.
2001 I believe that was. what an enlightening fellow, and a compassionate interviewer
Does anyone know what year this is? Mid 90s some time...
2001, I think
Oh my partner was telling me about the komdo dragon thing , hilarious
Love how they can jump from topic to topic seamlessly. They don't skip a beat.
It’s heavily edited you slob
You can tell that Amis hung around Hitchens alot. They have similar mannerisms.
Nabokov and Vidal imitations.
@Johnconno That's the sort of thing that a dumb person would say when trying to appear smart
@juliovillagran4105 Do you read the dictionary a lot?
Think this is the most entertaining of all the Clive James Library interviews. Pity they only last half an hour, presumably because he wanted to sell them to a TV channel. Don't think that happened? I"m now desperate to see those Ruby Wax films.
Just realised this isn't an official account. 849 subscribers should have been a clue. This library series is missing some notable episodes, Victoria Wood, Emma Thompson, Tom Stoppard, ect. Fortunately available on other channels.
These interviews are fascinating. Whenever politics is discussed the views expressed have been proven not just wrong, but 180 degree wrong. So much for brilliant minds.
Liz Truss just joined the chat.
"America is strong enough to attack Afganistan". Yes PJ, but not strong enough to defeat it. And yes George W did prove the warmonger many of us knew he would be. Two clever centrists proving how stupid clever centrists can be.
I met Simon on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence about 5 years ago. Had one of those star struck moments where I wanted him to just keep talking to hear more of that voice but was too nervous to say anything. I felt stupid but he was very gracious.
No disrespect to them but I find their whole premise to be a bit of a gimmick. I grew up in remote Canada and I find it silly that people from London go to a random part of the world they know nothing about and see an animal for 5 minutes and think they know anything about it. Their just travelers that draw random animals. Nothing spectacular about it really. I dont find their work inspiring. Just Yuppies that can paint. Lovely people though.
They don't seem to disagree with you, though
''Style is an expression of perception''
suzi es una mujer increíble, que hombre tan afortunado es damon de tenerla a su lado! tan inteligente y hermosa<3
This aged well💀💀
@@Supernerdystranger 😭😭 es la última vez q digo algo
La Dejo por Jeziel Alexis el modelo de instagram 😢😢😢😢😢
Suzi es tan hermosa e increíble. Te amo Suzi por ti le hecho ganas a la vida.
Larkin will be remembered, that’s the difference here - after all the ltut-tutting.
Caring about injustice, cruelty and hypocrisy? Never stopped us loving TS Eliot. But the cruelty, ignorance and bigotry does greatly diminish Larkin. It's an astonishing gap in his sometimes extraordinary imagination. Those who reduce it to tut-tutting miss the whole point of literature. He'll always be best known for the contradiction.
@@lizziebkennedy7505 It does not diminish him at all to some of us - so stop speaking from your prurient, tame little perch of sanctimonious conformity, woman.
@@lizziebkennedy7505 You would have to be fairly asinine to think the venting in Larkin’s letters affects the poems.
in North Face Of Soho clive james describes the weekly meeting of wits in london which he launched and where amis was king wit. in this conversation the two, many years later, are still competing - naming names and quoting like mad. james seems a bit pissed - keeping up and, characteristically, showing off his erudition. it may be as close as we'll get to seeing what those weekly 1970's brainfests were like.
They had three beers before lunch each on a working day and leered at passing women.
Come on, Celine's "Voyage" is amazing.
So many Hitch mannerisms in the Amis boy. But who influenced who? Both are great observers. Which one was the climber? It seems reasonable to find Amis innocent in this matter. Perhaps the more interesting question is which one deployed the resulting charm to greatest visual effect. Amis is deep and encyclopaedic. Hitch was more visible, and arguably more watchable.
I'd say Hitch was encyclopaedic himself.
I think Hitchens was more erudite than Amis. In his 'Inside story', Amis recounts with admiration how the Hitch gave him an impromptu lecture, on the origins of the first world war, starting his exposition with the battle of Kosovo in 1389. There's a wonderful essay by Hitch entitled 'Lightness at Midnight', were he implies that Amis's reading was deficient in the general area of Stalinist Communism, and even instances a couple of books. Also Hitch was superior in the way he summoned and marshalled facts, to deploy them effectively in an argument.
And Clive took apart Hitchens’ quaint insistence that all would have been fine had Lenin lived.
I read this differently. There's always got to room for flexibility and not being always right. which one was willing to grow and change and which one developed into a misguided opiniate who got some serious political matters horribly wrong 😅
It seems churlish now to complain that the sound is all out of sync. Thank you for sharing Clive.