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The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.

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
Finding
Grammar
Standards
Languages
Later
Vocabulary
Learned
Added
Read
German
Language
European
Cambridge
Way
Standard
Spanish
Good
Findings
Laboratory

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Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.
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Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.
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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
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The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.
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Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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.
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Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
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