From Fleet Street to the television, North Face of Soho is the fascinating and hilarious fourth volume of memoir from much-loved author, poet and broadcaster Clive James.

'[James] delivers his gags with honed elegance' - Sunday Times

It is 1968. Newly married, dressed in the style of the times ('a frenzy of bad judgement'), Clive James is leaving the cloistered world of Cambridge academia and setting his sights once again on the lights of literary London.

Luckily for him and us, this crack at the big city would go rather better than last time.

Still writing songs, directing sketch shows and trying to break into the movie business, with very mixed success, Clive eventually lands a weekly TV column at the Observer, finds his metier and rapidly becomes a household name. Credited with inventing a genre, Clive turns his attention to the previously critically disregarded medium of television to comment on the entire culture. Through the Seventies and early Eighties, from Fleet Street to Hollywood, from Russian department stores to Paris fashion shows, this is the hilarious, entertaining and honest story of a life lived to the full.

North Face of Soho is the fourth book of memoir from Clive James. Continue his story with The Blaze of Obscurity.

A lead title for Picador The fourth volume of Clive James's autobiography The first three volumes have between them sold in excess of 1,400,000 paperbacks Clive James will promote on publication with interviews and signings

About the Author
Clive James was the author of more than forty books. As well as essays, he published collections of literary and television criticism, travel writing, verse and novels, plus five volumes of autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, May Week Was In June, North Face of Soho and The Blaze of Obscurity. As a television performer he appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV, most notably as writer and presenter of the Postcard series of travel documentaries. He published several poetry collections, including the Sunday Times bestseller Sentenced to Life, and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, which was also a Sunday Times bestseller. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature. He held honorary doctorates from Sydney University and the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he was appointed CBE and in 2013, an Officer of the Order of Australia. He died in 2019.

Reviews
It's not just that he writes a lot, but that he writes with intense perfectionism, and delivers his gags with honed elegance * Sunday Times *
I feel I know more about the author after reading it than I gleaned from all of his other books put together. This is a book about hard-earned self-knowledge. What makes it funny is quite how hard the self-knowledge was to earn -- William Leith * Evening Standard *
His proses mixes together cleverness and clownishness, and achieves a fluency and a level of wit that makes his pages truly shimmer * Financial Times *



Book Information
ISBN 9780330481274
Author Clive James
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Picador
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 192g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 130mm * 17mm