Depending on your generation, Reliable Essays: the Best of Clive James either introduces or re-introduces a seriously entertaining literary talent. Collections of James' essays seem to appear perennially, but in the days before he swapped the TLS for TV, James wrote regular book reviews, a clutch of which are reproduced here. His appraisal of George Orwell, that peerless appraiser of other writers, is worthy of its subject, and the four pieces, in reverse chronology, celebrating Philip Larkin, re-affirm the singular English beauty of his poetry, and the considerable assets of his two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter. James omits his later review of the Andrew Motion biography, Philip Larkin, which perhaps would have finished, or rather begun, the sequence, but the four pieces stand on their own. One enduring theme in his writing is to judge the artist rather than the man or woman, exemplified in his predilection for writers such as Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh, and the entangled personae of the dauntingly talented--and equally learned--Barry Humphries. Though he mugs Malcolm Muggeridge, and enjoyably mocks the Sherlockologists, his jibes, though never cheap, are always of good value.

James is a polymath, yet as Julian Barnes points out in his pithy, affectionate introduction, perhaps the poetry, novels, television columns, television presenting, documentary-making and all-round celebrity detract from what is a considerable intellectual gift. James defends his more populist activities, yet this one-man 'brilliant bunch of guys', as the New Yorker put it, shows with extended pieces on Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners that he can punch his weight with the best of them, displaying erudition, compassion, depth of reading, and a commitment to language both vigilant and generous. With a new postscript following each piece, the tonal unity remains remarkable, considering the 30-year span of cultural inquiry that shows little sign of abating. Even As We Speak, another recent collection, covers the final decade of the 20th century, and includes his notorious requiem for the late Princess of Wales (it doesn't make the cut here, curiously), but Reliable Essays perhaps best captures his extraordinary breadth of vision, and intellectual agility. Television's loss will be literature's regain.--David Vincent