I've been browsing through the wonderful archive site belonging to the brilliant Clive James, once upon a time the only reason to buy The Observer newspaper.
The site link is here - http://www.clivejames.com/
and you will see just how monumentally informative, entertaining and extensive his writing et al is, packaged in this handy corner of the Internet.
I'm almost at the end of his BBC 'A Point Of View' broadcasts, ten-minute essays on everything and anything. Here's a piece from the one I have just finished. He has been talking about climate science, climate change, fact, fiction and mischief.
"Sceptics, say the believers, don’t care about the future of the human race. But being sceptical has always been one of the best ways of caring about the future of the human race. For example, it was from scepticism that modern medicine emerged, questioning the common belief that diseases were caused by magic, or could be cured by it. A conjecture can be dressed up as a dead certainty with enough rhetoric, and protected against dissent with enough threatening language, but finally it has to meet the only test of science, which is that any theory must fit the facts, and the facts can’t be altered to suit the theory."
Do yourself a favour, if you are stuck for reading material. Check out the site. It even contains much of the material from his TV critic's column in The Observer, 10 years (1972 to 1982), a masterclass in how to write such stuff. Much of today's criticism is nasty and too jokey for its own good. But, Clive James did it better than anyone.
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