North Face of Soho: More Unreliable Memoirs

Description

At the very end of May Week Was in June, we left our hero sitting beside the River Cam one beautiful 1968 spring day, jotting down his thoughts in a journal. Newly married and about to leave the cloistered world of Cambridge academia for the racier, glossier life promised by Literary London, he was, so he informed his journal, reasonably satisfied. But what happened next? This is the question posed (and answered) by North Face of Soho. Intelligent, amusing and provocative - the words apply to the man himself as much as his writing - the fourth volume of Unreliable Memoirs is every bit as eventful, entertaining, engrossing and honest as the previous three.

Clive James is the author of more than 30 books. As well as his four volumes of autobiography - Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, May Week was in June and North Face of Soho - he has published collections of literary and television criticism, essays, travel writing, verse and novels. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature. His latest book is Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time published in April 2007.

'It's not just that he writes a lot, but that he writes with intense perfectionism, and delivers his gags with honed elegance' Sunday Times 'I feel I know more about the author after reading it than I gleaned from all of his other books put together. This is a book about hard-earned self-knowledge. What makes it funny is quite how hard the self-knowledge was to earn' William Leith, Evening Standard