Clive James's Blog

26 July 1973: Clive James reviews a collection of Dylan’s lyrics, poems, writings and personal drawings

Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan (Cape, £2.50)

For a gentle but rapidly ageing generation, no book ever asked to be read to pieces like Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan. Helpfully, Jonathan Cape have bound its 300-plus pages in pink cardboard, so that it can come to pieces more easily.

26 June 1973: Clive James reviews a collection of Dylan’s lyrics, poems, writings and personal drawings

Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan (Cape, £2.50)

For a gentle but rapidly ageing generation, no book ever asked to be read to pieces like Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan. Helpfully, Jonathan Cape have bound its 300-plus pages in pink cardboard, so that it can come to pieces more easily.

Elizabeth II endured many tours during her reign, but few will have been recorded with such wit or observation as this visit to California

• Read more of the Observer’s From the Archive special on Queen Elizabeth II

The Royal Scuba Tour of California began last Saturday with scarcely any rain at all. The clouds over San Diego were full of water, but none of it was actually falling out of the sky as the Britannia edged towards Broadway Pier on the Embarcadero, just along from Anthony’s Fish Grotto....

What makes great poetry? An exclusive extract from the late critic’s final book The Fire of Joy celebrates the poems he loved most

The French expression feu de joie refers to a military celebration when all the riflemen of a regiment fire one shot after another, in close succession: ideally the sound should be continuous, like a drumroll. I first saw a feu de joie performed at an Australian army tattoo, in the main arena at the Sydney Showground, while I was still in short trousers. Later on, whe...

From meeting the Queen to his thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn’s beard, here are some choice cuts from the writer’s column in Guardian Weekend magazine

On War and Peace

On a shelf near where I sit writing this, there are half a dozen different editions of the book, and I’ve been reading one or other of them for half my life. Despite the heaps of evidence that Tolstoy was in reality half crackers, you would swear from the pages of War and Peace that he was God’s stenographer.

The author, critic and poet on reading Biggles as a child and his admiration for Philip Larkin

The book I am currently reading
Mostly at this stage I am rereading myself, and finding something marvellous on every page. I’ve just received the advance copies of my new book about Philip Larkin, called Somewhere Becoming Rain. Holding it up to be observed at various angles, I gloat audibly. On a less self-involved note, I should say that I am very much enjoying Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds. And I’ve just read Anne Appleba...Larkin

With Valentine’s Day in view, the veteran author and more come clean about their crazy, stupid, teenage loves

Grace Kelly’s career began as a 10-year cluster of roles for US television, but we didn’t see those in Australia, so her first movies made a terrific impact. She arose out of nowhere. I was still wearing short trousers, but I fell romantically in love with her when she arrived at James Stewart’s apartment in Rear Window and crossed the room f...loves

In and out of hospital, the writer felt compelled to write something new – an epic, with himself as the hero

Until a few days ago, I was a patient in Addenbrooke’s hospital, here in Cambridge, while a busload of nurses and doctors strove to persuade my temperature to stop acting like a wobbling yo-yo. Or anyway I assume they arrived by bus. I myself arrived by ambulance, strapped down against any tendency to slide on to the floor like a speeding custard.

It was a low moment in my recent medical history, but once...custard.

How to recover from my latest hospital stay? Watch The Crown – twice, and remember a royal meeting of my own

As my latest stay in hospital came to an end, the second series of The Crown was just starting on Netflix. Since my prescribed formula for rehabilitation consisted mainly of the instruction just to lie there and shut up, I had nothing to do except maintain the horizontal position and watch the delightful Claire Foy plough onward in her role of Queen. I thought she coped nobly.

So nobly, in fact, that when th...nobly.

Hardly anybody read my novel. There is an annual meeting of its readers, but it looks like those pictures of polar bears on an ice floe

My friend the film pundit Antonia Quirke was here recently to do a radio interview with me about Steve McQueen. There is another Steve McQueen nowadays, but we were scheduled to talk about the one who drives a Ford Mustang flat out down the bumpy hills of San Francisco in Bullitt. Antonia knows a lot about him. She knows, for example, that the sub-frame of the Mustang had to be especially reinforce...floe