'I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.' In the first instalment of Clive James' memoirs, we meet the young Clive, dressed in short trousers, and wrestling with the demands of school, various relatives and the occasional snake, in the suburbs of post-war Sydney.

'When we got off the ship in Southampton in that allegedly mild January of 1962 I had nothing to declare at customs except goose-pimples under my white nylon drip-dry shirt.' In the first volume of "Unreliable Memoirs," we said farewell to our hero as he set sail from Sydney Harbour, bound for London, fame and fortune. Finding the first of these proved relatively simple; the second two less so. Undaunted, Clive moved into a bed and breakfast in a Swiss Cottage where he practised the Twist, anticipated poetical masterpieces and worried about his wardrobe.

‘Arriving in Cambridge on my first day as an undergraduate, I could see nothing except a cold white October mist. At the age of twenty-four I was a complete failure, with nothing to show for my life except a few poems nobody wanted to publish in book form.’ Falling Toward England – the second volume of Clive James`s Unreliable Memoirs – was meant to be the last. Thankfully, that`s not the case. In Unrelaible Memoirs III, Clive details his time at Cambridge, including film reviewing, writing poetry, falling in love (often), and marrying (once). `Every line is propelled by a firecracker witticism` London Review of Books `He turns phrases, mixes together cleverness and clownishness, and achieves a fluency and a level of wit that make his pages truly shimmer... May Week Was In June is vintage James` Financial Times

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. From Fleet Street to Clive James on TV, from Russian department stores to Paris fashion shows, writing plays, poetry, lyrics, reviews, essays, articles, and novels - as well as Unreliable Memoirs volumes one, two, and three - Clive James was never not insanely busy. Throw in fatherhood, some killer bees, and a satire starring Anne Robinson as Mrs. Thatcher, and you still don't have the half of it.

The Blaze of The TV Years James, Clive