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Books

‘Doorways to the unknown’: Clive James’s Latest Readings

In this wry reading diary, James revisits the books he has most loved — for poetry, history and swashbuckling adventure

22 August 2015

9:00 AM

22 August 2015

9:00 AM

Latest Readings Clive James

Yale, pp.192, £12.99, ISBN: 9780300213195

In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.’ Auden’s criticism is like that: a passage of insights instead of a single sustained argument, and the same is true of Samuel Johnson, whose works are a pleasure to read for the feeling of the pressure of a great mind at play.

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