Having maintained a hand-to-mouth existence in London as the city swung into the Sixties, Clive James decided that Pembroke College, Cambridge offered a way out, if not up. He also decided, once there, that the only smart thing for a foreigner to do was not to bother about trying to fit in at all. He threw himself into the Footlights, instead of lectures, and anything else that wasn't on the curriculum. In fact, so uncommitted was he that he thought his final result, a 2:1, must have been a misprint. It wasn't so he applied for a research grant and spent as much time on his PhD as he had devoted to his degree.Clive James writes brilliantly on the subject he knows best: himself.
