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

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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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A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.
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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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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If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.
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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.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.
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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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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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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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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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