CLIVE JAMES at 67

'I need another 40 years' Books The Australian:

The secret of James's writing, whether it is for TV or highbrow essays, has been to combine that spoken style of clear English with a determination to pack ideas into his work. He became a devotee of 'the resonant sentence', he writes, citing an example by British journalist Katherine Whitehorn: 'You can recognise the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.'
'I loved the idea of talking that way on the page,' James says, and for the 35-odd years since then he has generally had the frantic energy and intellect to pull it off. 'I tried to give each piece everything, composing it as if it were a poem.'

A breakthrough came in 1972 when The Times Literary Supplement asked for a piece on US literary critic Edmund Wilson. Just 2000 words would have done but James wrote 11,000 and 10,000 were printed. The Times Literary Supplement did not name its writers in those days but Graham Greene was among many who found out who had written it so they could write to James to congratulate him.
'Flatteringly avuncular, Greene suggested that I might consider the discursive critical essay as my destined field of operations,' James writes. 'The piece wasn't as long as the letter I wrote in reply, which was probably the reason I never heard from him again. The success of the piece on Wilson was the beginning of my confidence in a tactical approach to print journalism by which I might get away with combining the apparently antagonistic roles of wiseacre and smart alec.'

So much work goes into wry observations such as his famous early description of Arnold Schwarzenegger as 'a brown condom full of walnuts' that in an unscripted chat James apologises for not being as compact and quotable as he would like to be.