Low Life: One Middle-Aged Man in Search of the Point by Jeremy Clarke

Some may question whether a review of a columnist’s work in the magazine in which that columnist’s work appears can ever be impartial. It can, and not just because this particular magazine is, as far as I recall, honest about this kind of thing. It’s because it’s in my interests to be hard on Jeremy Clarke. I write what you may describe as the equivalent column for your anti-matter counterpart, the New Statesman; moreover, I am engaged in the business of bunching my selected columns into a book, rather as he has done here. One does not want to encourage the competition.

Furthermore, I knew Clarke’s predecessor, the late Jeffrey Bernard, and although I had the odd misgiving about him as a person (one did not go to him in order to bask in the benign sunniness of his personality; and he once pinched a girlfriend of mine off me), I had considerable respect for him as both a writer and a personality.