He was allowed to change his name as a child because "after Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O'Hara the name became irrevocably a girl's name no matter how you spelled it".

Although he survived the prisoner-of-war camp, he died when the American B-24 carrying him and other freed Allied POWs ran into the tail of a typhoon en route from Okinawa to Manila, and crashed into the mountains of southeastern Taiwan.

[8] James, an only child, was brought up by his mother (Minora May, née Darke), a factory worker, in the Sydney suburbs of Kogarah and Jannali, living some years with his English maternal grandfather.

[11] During his first three years in London, he shared a flat with the Australian film director Bruce Beresford (disguised as "Dave Dalziel" in the first three volumes of James's memoirs), was a neighbour of Australian artist Brett Whiteley, became acquainted with Barry Humphries (disguised as "Bruce Jennings") and had a variety of occasionally disastrous short-term jobs: sheet metal worker, library assistant, photo archivist and market researcher.

[14] His contemporaries at Cambridge included Germaine Greer (known as "Romaine Rand" in the first three volumes of his memoirs), Simon Schama and Eric Idle.

[15][16][17] He was at times merciless and selections from the column were published in three books – Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box – and finally in a compendium, On Television.

[20] The Metropolitan Critic (1974), his first collection of literary criticism, was followed by At the Pillars of Hercules (1979), From the Land of Shadows (1982), Snakecharmers in Texas (1988), The Dreaming Swimmer (1992), Even As We Speak (2001), The Meaning of Recognition (2005) and Cultural Amnesia (2007), a collection of miniature intellectual biographies of over 100 significant figures in modern culture, history and politics.

[23] He published four mock-heroic poems: The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media: a moral poem (1975), Peregrine Prykke's Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World (1976), Britannia Bright's Bewilderment in the Wilderness of Westminster (1976) and Charles Charming's Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne (1981), and one long autobiographical epic, The River in the Sky (2018).

James wrote the album sleeve notes, which mostly linked the songs with thinly disguised jibes at popular artists and trends.

A revival of interest in the songs in the late 1990s, triggered largely by the creation by Steve Birkill of an Internet mailing list "Midnight Voices" in 1997, led to the reissue of the six albums on CD between 1997 and 2001, as well as live performances by the pair.

[25] James acknowledged the importance of the Midnight Voices group in bringing to wider attention the lyric-writing aspect of his career.

He wrote in November 1997, "That one of the midnight voices of my own fate should be the music of Pete Atkin continues to rank high among the blessings of my life".

[27][28] Writing for The New York Times, Joseph Luzzi thought it often failed to capture the more dramatic moments of the Inferno, but that it was more successful where Dante slows down, in the more theological and deliberative cantos of the Purgatorio and Paradiso.

[29] In 1980 James published his first book of autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, which recounted his early life in Australia and extended to over 100 reprintings.

It was followed by four other volumes of autobiography: Falling Towards England (1985), which covered his London years; May Week Was in June (1990), which dealt with his time at Cambridge; North Face of Soho (2006); and The Blaze of Obscurity (2009), concerning his subsequent career as a television presenter.

On the show when the Sex Pistols made their TV debut, James commented: "During the recording, the task of keeping the little bastards under control was given to me.

In 1995 he set up Watchmaker Productions to produce The Clive James Show for ITV, and a subsequent series launched the British career of singer and comedian Margarita Pracatan.

Topics covered included media portrayal of torture,[38] young black role models[39] and corporate rebranding.

[42] In December 2009, James talked about the P-51 Mustang and other American fighter aircraft of World War II in The Museum of Curiosity on BBC Radio 4.

James was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to literature and the media.

"[52] In a speech given in 1991, he criticised privatisation, saying: "The idea that Britain's broadcasting system—for all its drawbacks one of the country's greatest institutions—was bound to be improved by being subjected to the conditions of a free market: there was no difficulty in recognising that notion as politically illiterate.

[55] He also wrote that it was "official policy to rape a woman in front of her family" during Saddam Hussein's regime and that women have enjoyed more rights since the invasion.

[57] Describing religions as "advertising agencies for a product that doesn't exist", James was an atheist and saw it as the default and obvious position.

[1] Before this, for most of his working life, James divided his time between a converted warehouse flat in London and the family home in Cambridge.

[64] After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, James wrote a piece for The New Yorker entitled "Requiem", recording his overwhelming grief.

[58] James was a fan of the St George Dragons and wrote admiringly of Rugby League Immortal Reg Gasnier who was a schoolmate at Sydney Technical High School.

)[75] In April 2011, after media speculation that he had suffered kidney failure,[76] James confirmed in June 2012 that B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia "had beaten him" and that he was "near the end".