Clive James has a clever writing style but writes from the narrow standpoint of a group of people possessing and utilizing in-jokes long past. I wish there had been more explanations of a straightforward presentation so the reader could be in on the jokes too

Clive James as a student at Pembroke College Cambridge studiously avoiding anything remotely connected to the course he is supposed to be taking. Interposed between trips to Italy, Footlights and poetry this tale of a very lucky young man unfolds at breakneck pace. Very funny in bits...

At the end of the previous volume James had finished two years mooching about in London and had been finally accepted for an undergraduate degree at Cambridge University. This volume follows his time there. He quickly finds Eric Idle and the Footlights and his future life starts to get sketched in. Ostensibly reading English he reads everything bar the prescribed texts, starts to learn Italian and then French, skips classes, drinks and smokes too much, and throws himself headfirst into the Unive...

Started this as part of my intention to read all 5 James memoirs, but abandoned it halfway through. Partly because I'm keen to get on with reading more fiction, but also because I was becoming irritated with James's lechery over women in this particular book. It's good that he's so honest about himself, often at the cost of reader sympathy, but this aspect of his young life becomes repetitive and dull. I think one problem may be that the James writing this book, in about 1990, is the ubiquitous

The third in the collected autobiographies volume I got out, in order to re-read ‘Unreliable Memoirs.’ This was also amusing and interesting, but not as funny as the first two. James is coming into his own here, at Cambridge University, and enjoying his first successes as a writer and as a producer of Footlights. His self-deprecating style doesn’t always come off.

Clive goes to Pembroke College, Cambridge to study. Here he joined the Footlights review, participated in film reviewing, wrote poetry and fell in love on several occasions. The book also details his period as a literary editor of Granta, the articles he wrote for The New Statesman and the period when he took Footlights to the Edinburgh Fringe. Then during May week, which was not only in June but was two weeks long, he married. This book follows Unreliable Memoirs and Falling Towards England. Cl...

This is a book you must read as if he is reading it to you. Confirms to me I would not have been happy in Oxbridge. I can see a lot of myself in him but writ small. A flawed character, subject to whims and temptation with a great need to convince himself he is improving himself.

Very self-conscious and became quite 'precious' in the volume of name-dropping. Yes, he was there, he was it, he was experienced, but the narrative flow was clunky. His desperate search for sex, less than for love, also became tiresome. We all know that men's genitals and their thoughts can be extremely importunate, but talk about flogging a tired (and sometimes non-performing) horse!

This was my third Clive James book in as many months. There was much to like (I particularly enjoyed James's reflections on the protests of 1968 towards the book's close), but it took me an absolute age to finish. Having had to abandon Karl Ove Knausgård's sixth and final volume mid-way through a few months ago, I can only conclude that you really can have too much of a good thing. Or that I watch far too much TV.

I read the first 2 books of Unreliable Memoirs many years ago and absolutely loved them, so when I found this I snapped it up. Unfortunately, the humour of the earlier books is scarce in this one. Clive James drowns the personal story in pretentious, literary twaddle and the overall effect is self-important and heavy handed. This is a tale of someone who seems to have fallen on their feet, does well at Cambridge, and then repeatedly claims that it's all a fluke because they never put in any work...

This is a good book but sadly the humour of the first two parts of these memoirs is hard to find... but I persevered because he still pulled out some fabulous observations.Glad I finished it but I won’t reread... my love for Jane’s lays in his poetry these days .

This third volume of unreliable memoirs picks up where the previous volume (Falling Towards England) let off. James, in these books, is interesting, yet not as funny, at least to me, as it seems the things he is describing should be. I definitely need to give his fiction a try.The nice thing about reading a writer's biography like this is to realize that you are not alone. It is much too easy for me to think that I am the only one with trouble concentrating on the matter at hand instead of flirt...

The next installment. The usual japes. But profundities abound with credit given to Proust. And good advice comes too as he learns his writing craft. Linear sentences, for example. Structure: set up, early pay-off, development, late pay-off, closing number. Thought-provoking.

very enjoyable although not at the level of hilarious of volume 1

Some books you devour with relish and with an almost orgiastic fervour. You know the end of the book is coming and you can't stop yourself careering toward its conclusion. You'll feel empty and bereft - the book absorbed you, held you in thrall with every delicious line sending you on to the next delicious line and then it's gone.Over.Fuck it..........Fortunately, this is the third in a series of Clive James' autobiographies and I have only read this and the first one.Clive James worked out fair...

Peaks and troughs. Hilarious alternating with turgid.

Clive reviewed it himself at the end and I really can't improve on his words! Enjoyed immersing myself in the times and Mr James's witty and poetic language. The understanding that the memoirs are unreliable make them bittersweet. Nice to hear more about Jonathan Lynn and a thinly-disguised Germaine Greer.

The third (and, the author tells us, final - although there were actually two more to come) volume of Unreliable Memoirs finds Clive James at Cambridge in the sixties. Reading everything except what he was supposed to be reading, and writing poetry, articles, song lyrics, travel pieces and sketches for Footlights (of which he soon finds himself president), but precious little in the form of essays or papers, he cuts a fascinating path through the university. Most of the time he is perfecting his...

Almost five stars because I did laugh out loud a fair bit, but not quite as funny as the previous two volumes of his memoirs. This one describes Clive James's time as a student at Cambridge University, along with several foreign trips in and out of term, and a bizarre experience making a film for a friend. He writes for and performs in the Cambridge Footlights, makes friends who were to find fame later on, begins his journalistic career, and rounds it off with his marriage. Also, as an aside, I

And this clever, funny man goes on...