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A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.

Clive James

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Clive James
Age: 80 †
Born: 1939
Born: October 7
Died: 2019
Died: November 24
Author
Broadcaster
Literary Critic
Poet
Television Presenter
Writer
Kogarah
New South Wales
Australia
Clive Vivian Leopold James
Clive Vivian James
Player
Tennis
Way
Classic
Boxes
Rounds
Fixture
Players
Wimbledon
Traditional
Eliminated
British
Commentary
Early
Fills

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Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.
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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.
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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.
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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.
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I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.
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I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.
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Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.
Clive James
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In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.
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Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting.
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