Books: Brrm! Brrm! | clivejames.com

On “Current” and “Out-of-Print” Books
The Unreliable Memoirs series
Collections of Essays
- The Metropolitan Critic
  - Foreword to the New Edition
  - Foreword
  - The Metropolitan Critic
  - Big Medicine
  - When the Gloves Are Off
  - Everything's Rainbow
  - Settling for Dust
  - John Berryman: On the Dream Songs
  - John Berryman: On Love & Fame
  - Roethke: On his Collected Poems
  - Roethke: On his Selected Letters
  - An Instrument to Measure Spring With
  - Keyes and Douglas
  - Sniper Style
  - Walker
  - Augustan Wattle
  - Seamus Heaney
  - The Wheeze Incarnadined
  - Roy Fuller's Magisterial Thumb
  - Love, Help and the Performing Self
  - F. R. Leavis in America
  - D.H. Lawrence in transit
  - The Perpetual Promise of James Agee
  - A Dinosaur at Sunset
  - The Last Amateur
  - Richard Neville's Play Power
  - After the Oz Trial
  - Another Dreamer
  - The Green American
  - Getting Married Later
  - An Absolute Lady
  - Aquarius, Prisoner of Sex
  - Tom Wolfe's The Mid-Atlantic Man
  - A Whole Gang of Noise
  - Rough Beast
  - He Didn't Stifle
  - The New Lost
  - The Fascist Intellectuals
  - Tell England: or, In the Penal Colony
  - A Poor Report on Violence
  - Supplementary Viewpoints
- At the Pillars of Hercules
  - Introduction to the Picador Edition
  - Foreword
  - Auden (i) On Epistle to a Godson
  - Auden (ii) On Forewords and Afterwords
  - Auden (iii) On his Death
  - Robert Lowell's Marble Chips
  - Philip Larkin (i) Wolves of Memory
  - Philip Larkin (ii) Smaller and Clearer
  - Philip Larkin (iii) Davie's Larkin
  - Philip Larkin (iv) The North Window
  - Supplier of Verses: John Betjeman
  - Kenneth Slessor's Importance
  - The Poetry of Edmund Wilson
  - After Such Knowledge: T. S. Eliot
  - In Homage to Gianfranco Contini
  - Poetry's Ideal Critic: Randall Jarrell
  - Wittgenstein's Dream
  - The Sherlockologists
  - The Country Behind the Hill
  - The Effective Intelligence of N. Balchin
  - Bitter Seeds: Solzhenitsyn
  - It is of a Windiness: Lillian Hellman
  - The Watcher in Spanish
  - Dick's Diaries: Richard Crossman
  - Unpatriotic Gore: Gore Vidal
  - Kennedy's Ideal Biographer
  - Mailer's Marilyn
  - Count Zero Splits the Infinite
- From the Land of Shadows
  - Misia & All Paris
  - Bernard Levin: Book Two
  - Doubting Castle
  - Only Human: On Nuremberg
  - From Log Cabin to Log Cabin
  - Little Malcolm & His Struggle...
  - Hard-core Gore
  - Go Back to the Cold!
  - In our Graham Greenery
  - Pensée Persons
  - Look Forward in Mild Irritation
  - A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses
  - Waugh's Last Stand
  - Fannikins' Cunnikin
  - In Their Flying Machines
  - The Examined Life of Kingsley Amis
  - On Larkin's Wit
  - Catacomb Graffiti
  - Grigson's Satirical Tradition
  - All the Facts
  - Flights of Angels
  - As a Matter of Tact
  - These Staggering Questions
  - Nabokov's Grand Folly
  - Pushkin is the Sea
  - Voznesensky's Case
  - Transparent Petropolis
  - Voices from the Pit
  - The Road to Berlin
  - Big Book from Screwsville
  - A State of Boredom
  - Awkward Laughter
- Snakecharmers in Texas
  - Introduction
  - A Death in Life
  - Elaborate Brute
  - On Barry Humphries
  - The Boy from Brisbane
  - Les Is More
  - A Dream of Zinc Cream
  - The First Iron Lady
  - Ruins Without Value
  - Ground-Level Entrance
  - You Little Bobby-Dazzler
  - On the Library Coffee-Table
  - Montale’s Capital Book
  - On Montale’s Prose
  - Elastic White Thighs
  - Necessary Inhibitions
  - Lively Copy
  - An Affair of Sanity
  - ’Tis Vidocq!
  - Kung-Fu Wit
  - Boys Will Be Girls
  - Pure Genius
  - Boomtown Saint
  - N.V. Rampant Meets Martin Amis
  - The Wrong Lady Diana
  - Out Into the Light
  - The Queen in California, 1983
  - Dedicated Follower
  - Ugh!
  - The New Diaghilev
  - Making a Whore Movie
  - Pictures in Silver
  - Ice-Dancers
  - The Sound of the Crucible
  - Close Thing in Portugal
  - Holders of the Golden Cross
  - Riviera Daydream
  - Nearly Mansell
  - Campaign Down the Drain
  - Underdog at Overlord
  - The March of History
  - Around the World in One Pair of Shoes
- The Dreaming Swimmer
  - Introduction
  - Not Drowning but Waving
  - Somewhere becoming rain
  - Last Will and Testament
  - Galway Kinnell's Great Poem
  - The Australian Poetic Republic
  - Your Space or Mine?
  - Fanfare for a Big Yin
  - Sarah Raphael
  - We Shall Be Re-released
  - He that Played the Fool
  - For Terence Kilmartin
  - Pit-bull Poodle
  - The Words Count
  - Serious Brain Operation
  - Making Programmes the World Wants
  - Preaching to the Converted
  - On the Eve of Disaster
  - Chip, Chip, Chip
  - Jet-lag in Tokyo
  - The Light Well
  - Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini
  - Drama in the Soviet Union
  - Go back to the Opal Sunset
  - Budge Up
  - The Artificial Horizon
  - Last night the sea ... Greta Scacchi
  - What Happened to Auden
  - Incredible Two-headed Man
  - Finally Meeting Frankie
  - Staying Sane Aloft
  - L.A. Lore
  - News Fantasy
  - Sidney Carton's Double Life
- Even as We Speak
  - Introduction
  - The All of Orwell
  - Hitler's Unwitting Exculpator
  - Postscript to Goldhagen
  - Mark Twain, Journalist
  - Casanova Comes Again
  - B. Russell Struggles After Heaven
  - Getting Larkin's Number
  - Karl's Strange Engine
  - Pier Paolo Pain in the Neck
  - Mondo Fellini
  - Who Was that Masked Man?
  - Plain Clothes Police State
  - Requiem
  - Postscript to a Requiem
  - My Life in Pop
  - Peter Cook
  - Incident at St Denis
  - The Year It Didn't Happen
  - Destination Europe
  - A Voice is Born
  - Les Murray and his Master Spirits
  - Running Beside Ron Clarke
  - On the List
  - Up Here from Down There
  - George Russell: A Reminiscence
  - Preface to an Australian Classic
  - Let's Talk about Us
  - Introduction
  - Hamlet in Perspective
  - Bring Back the Overqualified
  - Presenting the R. Dimbleby Award
  - Anzac Day Dawn Service Address
  - Introduction
  - The Gentle Slope to Castalia
  - Noble Talking Heads
  - Beachcomber's Stuff
  - Opening, Sydney Olympics, 2000
  - Carry That Torch
  - Thorpie, Hoogie and The Golden Lolly
  - Prelude to Cathy
  - Second Week in Sydney
  - Olympic Crescendo
  - Olympics Finale
- The Meaning of Recognition
- The Revolt of the Pendulum
  - Introduction
  - The Question of Karl Kraus
  - John Bayley's Daily Bread
  - Kingsley and the Women
  - Canetti, Man of Mystery
  - Camille Paglia Burns for Poetry
  - The Guidebook Detectives
  - Denis Healey's Classic Memoir
  - Exit Roth's Ghost
  - Flight from the Destroyer
  - Saying Famous Things
  - Insult to the Language
  - Perfectly Bad Sentence
  - Happiness Writes White
  - All Stalkers Kill
  - In Praise of Tommy Cooper
  - A Microphone for the Audience
  - Best Eaten Cold
  - Velvet Shackles of a Reputation
  - Don’t Hold Your Breath, Argentina
  - White Shorts of Leni Riefenstahl
  - Made in Britain?
  - On American Movie Critics
  - Show Me the Horror
  - The Measure of A. D. Hope
  - Robert Hughes Remembers
  - Modern Australian Painting
  - A Question for Diamond Jim
  - Exit John Howard
  - ABR 300
  - The Voice of John Anderson
  - Bea Miles, Vagrant
  - Niki Lauda Wins Going Slowly
  - Damon Hill's Bravest Day
  - Going On in Edinburgh
  - Gateway to Infinity
  - Back on the Road
  - Lure of the Lyrics
  - Five Favourites
  - Jonathan James-Moore
  - Ian Adam
  - Richard Drewett
  - Alan Coren
  - Pat Kavanagh
  - Music in the Dark
  - Starting with Sludge
- “Best Of” essay collections
Latest Readings
Cultural Amnesia
- Introduction
- A Note on the Text
- Acknowledgements
- Overture: Vienna
- Anna Akhmatova
- Peter Altenberg
- Louis Armstrong
- Raymond Aron
- Walter Benjamin
- Marc Bloch
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Robert Brasillach
- Sir Thomas Browne
- Albert Camus
- Dick Cavett
- Paul Celan
- Chamfort
- Coco Chanel
- Charles Chaplin
- Nirad C Chaudhuri
- G K Chesterton
- Jean Cocteau
- Gianfranco Contini
- Benedetto Croce
- Tony Curtis
- Ernst Robert Curtius
- Miles Davis
- Sergei Diaghilev
- Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
- Alfred Einstein
- Duke Ellington
- Federico Fellini
- W C Fields
- F Scott Fitzgerald
- Gustave Flaubert
- Sigmund Freud
- Egon Friedell
- François Furet
- Charles de Gaulle
- Edward Gibbon
- Terry Gilliam
- Josef Goebbels
- Witold Gombrowicz
- William Hazlitt
- Hegel
- Heinrich Heine
- Adolf Hitler
- Ricarda Huch
- Ernst Jünger
- Franz Kafka
- John Keats
- Leszek Kołakowski
- Alexandra Kollontai
- Heda Margolius Kovaly
- Karl Kraus
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- Norman Mailer
- Nadezhda Mandelstam
- Golo Mann
- Heinrich Mann
- Michael Mann
- Thomas Mann
- Mao Zedong
- Chris Marker
- John McCloy
- Zinka Milanov
- Czeslaw Milosz
- Eugenio Montale
- Montesquieu
- Alan Moorehead
- Paul Muratov
- Lewis Namier
- Grigory Ordzhonokidze
- Octavio Paz
- Alfred Polgar
- Beatrix Potter
- Jean Prévost
- Marcel Proust
- Edgar Quinet
- Marcel Reich-Ranicki
- Jean-François Revel
- Richard Rhodes
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Virginio Rognoni
- Ernesto Sabato
- Edward Said
- Sainte-Beuve
- José Saramago
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Erik Satie
- Arthur Schnitzler
- Sophie Scholl
- Wolf Jobst Siedler
- Manès Sperber
- Tacitus
- Margaret Thatcher
- Henning von Tresckow
- Leon Trotsky
- Karl Tschuppik
- Dubrava Ugrešić
- Miguel de Unamuno
- Pedro Henriquez Ureña
- Paul Valéry
- Mario Vargas Llosa
- Evelyn Waugh
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Isoroku Yamamoto
- Aleksandr Zinoviev
- Carl Zuckmayer
- Stefan Zweig
- Eckstein and the Egyptian Kinghopper
Poetry Notebook
- Introduction
- Acknowledgements
- Listening to the Flavour
- Five Favourite Poetry Books
- The Arrow Has Not Two Points
- Meeting MacNeice
- Little Low Heavens
- On a Second Reading
- Poetry Archive Tour
- The Necessary Minimum
- A Deeper Consideration
- Product Placement in Modern Poetry
- Technique’s Marginal Centrality
- A Stretch of Verse
- The Donaghy Negotiation
- There You Come Home
- Interior Music
- Part II: Interlude (prologue)
- John Updike’s Poetic Finality
- Stephen Edgar Stays Perfect
- Poetry Heaven, Election Hell
- Les Murray’s Palatial New Shed
- Talking to Posterity: Peter Porter
- Elegance in Overalls: Christian Wiman
- Michael Longley Blends In
- Spectator Diary
- Building the Sound of Sense
- Part II: Interlude (epilogue)
- Trumpets at Sunset
Books of Television Criticism
Other Non-Fiction
- A Point of View
  - Introduction (BBC)
  - BBC Interview
  - Attack of the Wheelie Bins
  - The Mind's Construction in the Face
  - Fidgets on the March
  - Flying People, Flagrant Piffle
  - Nob Voices, Yob Voices
  - Because She's Worth It
  - Going for Gold
  - Black Destiny
  - Torture on 24
  - Congratulations!
  - Man-made Beauty
  - Reflections on a Diamond Skull
  - Glider Shoes
  - Wimbledon Wisdom
  - Helplessly Advanced
  - Harry Potter Envy
  - Smoking the Memory
  - Desirable Devices
  - Click on the Icon
  - Clams Are Happy
  - Princes into Battle
  - Private Life
  - State of Law
  - Pedal Power
  - Terminal Terminal
  - Right on the Money
  - Legal Dilemmas
  - Instructions to the Sea
  - Snoop and Amy
  - Gaffes
  - How Rich is Rich?
  - Changing the Government
  - Robin the Hood
  - Bad Language
  - Glamourising terror
  - Writer's Room
  - National Identity
  - Wrap It Up
  - Jesus
  - New Year Prediction
  - The Speeding Judge
  - High-Priced Porn
  - Bright Side of the Cane Toad
  - Reputational Damage
  - Britain Has Talent
  - London Underground
  - Sheer Poetry
  - Expensive Mistakes
  - Feminism and Democracy
  - Newsflash from the Far East
  - The Golf-Ball Potato Crisp
  - On Strike
  - High Road to Xanadu
  - The Man on the Fourth Plinth
  - Blog de Jour
  - Spirit of the Game
  - Impact
  - Hermie's Ghost
  - Option Swamp
  - Talking About Their Generation
  - Conclusion
- Flying Visits
- Fame in the 20th Century
Novels

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Brrm! Brrm!

or

The Man from Japan

or

Perfume at Anchorage

to Noriko Izuma

for her gift to me, Japan

all other girls grow dull as painted flowers
or flutter harmlessly like coloured flies
whose wings are tangled in the net of leaves
spread by thin boughs that grow behind your eyes.

— Edgell Rickword

Reduce this lady unto marble quickly,
Ray her beauty on a glassy plate,
Rhyme her youth as fast as the granite,
Take her where she trembles, and do not wait,
For now in funeral white they lead her
And crown her queen of the House of No Love:
A dirge, then, for her beauty, Musicians!

— John Crowe Ransom