Californians might be asked to vote on another homelessness ballot measure next year under a new proposal being considered by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s top homelessness advisers.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who co-chair the governor’s homelessness task force, are discussing a potential 2020 statewide ballot measure that would fund a plan to provide all Californians with a new right to shelter.

The plan, which would provide enough shelter space for any homeless person who wants to come indoors, wouldn’t raise taxes but would reallocate funding from a supplemental income tax on millionaires that’s currently used to pay for mental health services in California.

“We believe that if we define the public policy of California in a different way than it’s currently defined, then we actually as a state can make pretty dramatic strides to improve the homeless problem,” Steinberg said at a forum on homelessness earlier this month.

This episode of “Gimme Shelter: The California Housing Crisis Podcast” is the hour-long conversation with Steinberg and Ridley-Thomas, held at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica. The interview also delves into the state’s overall approach to resolving the homelessness problem, and the tensions between spending money on permanent supportive housing and temporary shelters.

“Gimme Shelter,” a biweekly podcast that looks at why it’s so expensive to live in California and what the state can do about it, features Liam Dillon, who covers housing affordability issues for the Los Angeles Times, and Matt Levin, data and housing reporter for CALmatters.

You can subscribe to “Gimme Shelter” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play and Overcast.

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Authorities release new details and appeal to the public for help in solving a possible kidnapping earlier this month in South Los Angeles.

After investigating more than 30 tips with no results, the Los Angeles Police Department is now seeking the public’s help in finding the victim and suspect of a potential kidnapping in South L.A. earlier this month.

At a Wednesday news conference, the LADP released an updated photo of the vehicle authorities believe the suspect used.

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At 11:10 p.m. on Nov. 12, a doorbell with a video camera and microphone captured the screams of a woman yelling for help at least 10 times in a residential area of Leimert Park just south of Obama Boulevard.

A vehicle that has now been identified as a 2003 to 2008 white Toyota Matrix with dark wheel rims was then seen driving along 3rd Avenue toward 39th Street Street at a high rate of speed with the rear hatch open. Witnesses originally thought the vehicle was a Toyota Camry.

The vehicle was last seen in the area of Greyburn Avenue and Obama Boulevard, the LAPD said. Det. David Marcinek of the LAPD’s Southwest Division said witnesses reported the vehicle’s passenger window was punched out and covered in plastic. Marcinek said it was unclear whether the incident was a kidnapping or a domestic dispute. A review of missing persons reports from across the region did not provide any leads, Marcinek said.

The LAPD asked anyone with information to contact Marcinek at (213) 485-2197. Anonymous tips can be left at (800) 222-TIPS.

Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson said Wednesday he intends to step down from the council presidency in January and is pushing for Councilwoman Nury Martinez to succeed him in the post.

Wesson, president of the 15-member council since 2012, said he is leaving the powerful post to focus on his bid for a seat on the Los Angeles County Supervisors in the March election. He introduced a motion calling for a vote on his replacement to be held Tuesday. He will continue to serve on the City Council until his term expires in December 2020.

Wesson, who represents neighborhoods stretching from Koreatown to the Crenshaw Corridor, touted a list of his accomplishments as president, including multiple increases in the city’s minimum wage, passage of a $1.2-billion bond measure to battle homelessness and a shift in the city’s election schedule to even-numbered years, a step aimed at boosting voter turnout.

“I’m so proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish as a unified council over the last eight years,” he said in a statement.

Still, some have argued that the council has been too unified under Wesson’s tenure, with open debate kept to a minimum and the vast majority of decisions receiving unanimous votes. Rob Quan, an organizer with the the advocacy group Unrig L.A., went further, arguing that Wesson has fostered a culture that discourages dissent.

Quan, whose group is focused on reducing the influence of money in politics, said Wesson led the council as it reduced the amount of time given to members of the public to comment.

Last month, Quan was approached by security officers — and publicly chastised by Councilman Joe Buscaino — at a meeting where he pointed out that the council did not have a quorum to continue conducting business legally.

“I was threatened with arrest if I didn’t leave the council chambers for simply questioning the fact that they didn’t have enough council members on the floor,” he said.

Wesson is campaigning in the March election to replace County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who is facing term limits after 12 years in his post. Other candidates in the contest include state Sen. Holly Mitchell, former Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry and author and political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson.

Ridley-Thomas, who has served on the council previously, is now one of the candidates running for Wesson’s seat.

Council presidents wield a great deal of power, deciding when and how policy proposals are discussed at public meetings. The president determines the makeup of council committees that oversee homelessness, public safety, real estate development and other issues — and hands out plum appointments to those who want to head those panels.

Martinez, whose district includes Van Nuys, Arleta and Panorama City, thanked Wesson in a statement for nominating her and said she hopes to earn her colleagues’ support for next week’s presidency vote.

Wesson and several of his colleagues have also nominated Buscaino to serve next year as president pro tem, replacing Martinez.

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The stormy Thanksgiving holiday in California took some out-of-town travelers by surprise. They expected sunshine but got rain.

“I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t pack a single coat in my suitcase. I thought I would be wearing flip-flops,” said Vy Powell, who traveled from Virginia to Orange County to visit her aging parents for the holidays.

Her flight cut into her Black Friday budget and “now that we’re stuck at home instead of lounging at the beach, I know I’m going to spend even more money eating,” said the child-care provider visiting Anaheim for the week. “We’re already going to overeat for the Thanksgiving meal. This whole break really isn’t a break. We’ll be paying for this for a while.”

Her one consolation, she said, is that she didn’t prepay for Disneyland tickets. But her younger brother, Harry Bui, did — and he now has major buyer’s remorse.

The college student, in town from Boston, said he anticipated checking out popular Disney characters on parade and sampling new rides with Park Hopper tickets for him and his friends.

“The magic of the park is taking photos of Mickey and the cool cast in sunshine. Have you ever seen a bunch of online images with rain sprinkled all over? I sure haven’t,” said Bui, who expected he would spend more than he intended because he would be ducking into stores to avoid the rain.

“Shopping is not what I had in mind,” said the business major. “I already have enough stuff. This weather is crappy.”

A cold front originating in the Gulf of Alaska arrived in portions of Northern California on Tuesday and immediately began causing headaches for motorists along mountain passes inundated by flurries of snow. In Los Angeles County, motorists had a damp drive under cloudy skies as the beginning of rain from the storm fell during the morning rush hour. The rain is expected to taper off in the afternoon, said Andrew Rorke, a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

“The real impacts will be tomorrow,” he said.

The storm was better news for ski resorts.

Justin Kanton, marketing manager for Big Bear Mountain Resort, said snow started hitting the slopes around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday and has steadily picked up since.

“I’m looking at it right now,” he said. “It looks like what everybody imagines when they think of ski resorts and winter in the mountains — everything is starting to get nice and white for when people get their first laps.”

Kanton said he was excited the storm was rolling in Wednesday because Snow Summit, one of the company’s two Big Bear resorts, is set to open Thursday. Sister resort Bear Mountain will be open on weekends starting Friday before fully opening Dec. 20.

“Forecasts are calling for flurries through Saturday,” Kanton said, adding that he would advise visitors to monitor tire chain advisories and check road conditions before heading up.

Kanton guessed that 1 to 2 inches of snow had fallen over the course of three hours.

“It’s definitely picking up, so it’s going to go up pretty significantly,” he said.

Farther north, Mammoth Mountain reported nearly 2 feet of snowfall that was “still coming down hard.” Forecasts there predicted high winds and heavy snowfall throughout the day.

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Onstage recently before a couple of hundred fans in a small studio in Silver Lake, Camila Cabello spoke in gushing, nothing-to-hide detail about how a very special relationship — the singer’s first taste of true love — had indelibly shaped the songs on her new album, “Romance.”

She and this guy had started off as friends, Cabello told the crowd gathered for an invite-only performance sponsored by Apple Music; for a long time, she didn’t admit to herself how much she liked him. But then there was that undeniable kiss in July in San Francisco, the one that led her to realize that with him — only with him — she could drop “the mask of perfection,” as she put it.

You can imagine the wave of awwws that went rippling through the audience.

As intimately as she was describing this relationship, Cabello, 22, seemed to go out of her way to avoid identifying the dude by name — even though everyone in the room knew she was talking about Shawn Mendes, the exquisitely coiffed 21-year-old pop heartthrob with whom she’s been linked publicly since the summer.

“I guess I was avoiding it, yeah,” Cabello said a few weeks after the show as she snuggled under a blanket on a sofa at her home in West Hollywood. “I mean, I don’t call him Shawn Mendes, you know? I call him pet names that I’m not gonna say in this interview.” She laughed. “But I feel like when I say his name, it’s just contributing to the pop-culture circus.

“As soon as I do it, I can hear the screams” — here she expertly imitated an excited girl’s squeal — “and I’m like, ‘No, no, no, you’re not hearing what I’m trying to say.’ I’m not talking about it as some Twitter thing.

“That’s my boyfriend. This is real.”

For Cabello, “Romance” offers an opportunity to express her feelings about Mendes with the depth and consideration she thinks they deserve. Due Dec. 6, the album — Cabello’s second solo LP since she left the girl group Fifth Harmony three years ago — carefully traces the evolution of the singers’ relationship, from teenage pals to savvy collaborators (on the 2015 duet “I Know What You Did Last Summer”) to grown-up lovers with a sexual chemistry to match their emotional connection.

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The songs — which Cabello co-wrote with a host of industry pros including Frank Dukes, Louis Bell, Benny Blanco, Amy Wadge and Finneas O’Connell — are determined in their efforts to dig beneath the tabloid-style depiction of a picturesque Hollywood couple. In the sensual “Easy,” Cabello describes her boyfriend’s attraction to “the stretch marks all around my thighs,” while the disarmingly frank “First Man” has the singer promising her dad that Mendes won’t drink and drive with her in the car.

“I just met his family,” she sings over a ringing piano lick, “They’re just like you and mom.”

Still, there’s no doubt that Cabello’s alliance with Mendes — the version of their relationship that plays out in pictures and headlines on social media — has been a boon to her solo career, which began auspiciously when Cabello topped both the Billboard 200 and the Hot 100 in the same week last year with her self-titled debut and its lead single, “Havana.”

In August, she hit No. 1 again with her and Mendes’ slinky duet “Señorita,” which like “Havana” nods to her background as the daughter of a Cuban mother and a Mexican father; this month the song — streamed more than 1.7 billion times on Spotify and YouTube — was nominated for a Grammy Award for best pop duo/group performance.

John Ivey of iHeartMedia, who oversees the radio conglomerate’s Top 40 stations and programs KIIS-FM (102.7) in Los Angeles, said Cabello is “skyrocketing” toward pop’s upper ranks — a few rungs below her friend Taylor Swift, for whom she served as an opening act on Swift’s 2018 stadium tour, but getting closer all the time. (On Dec. 6, Cabello will perform alongside Billie Eilish, Lizzo and BTS at KIIS-FM’s annual Jingle Ball concert at the Forum.)

Clearly, the singer had a head start with Fifth Harmony, which emerged from the “X Factor” show and went on to score mid-level hits such as “Worth It” and “Work From Home.” Cabello said her decision to audition for the televised competition in 2012 surprised her parents, who viewed her as a supremely shy kid. But once unbottled, her ambition surged. “Everyone in the business knew that Camila was the most outgoing member,” Ivey said, comparing her to Harry Styles from One Direction.

Cabello looks back at the experience in “the group,” as she refers to it — Fifth Harmony is another name she never says outright — as an era of artistic limitation; she quit, in her telling, because her band mates objected to her wanting a more significant creative role. For her debut she broke free of what she called the girl-group “formula,” dabbling in hip-hop and Latin pop. But lyrically she was still operating in something of a closed system.

“On my first album, my music-making was where I got my adrenaline and the stories and the feeling,” said Cabello, wearing a jewel-toned blouse with billowing sleeves, her hair in a long side ponytail. As the singer’s mom futzed in the kitchen, gentle New Age music drifted from unseen speakers — part of Cabello’s preparation for an angel-themed rendition of her song “Living Proof” on that weekend’s American Music Awards.

“I literally just typed in ‘angel music,’” she said with a laugh.

Her point about her last record was that, having worked nonstop since she was 15, she didn’t have much else to write about. “I didn’t go on dates or hang out with friends because I was on tour for five years,” she said.

That changed with “Romance,” for which she stayed put in L.A., writing songs as she and Mendes grew closer. “This time life was the roller coaster, and the studio was where I went to document it.”

O’Connell, best known for his work with Eilish, his younger sister, recalled getting together with Cabello in March and going over a few ideas, none of which went very far. “Then she texts me out of the blue a few months later: ‘I have this song I need to write,’” he said. In the studio the next day, “Used to This” — a dreamy ballad about that fated evening in San Francisco — promptly tumbled out.

“The best songs on the album came when I was like, ‘I just had the best night of my life,’” said Cabello, whose breathy moan on the song puts across a kind of painfully ecstatic sensation. “It wasn’t about wanting to impress anybody or make a good song for radio. All that stuff is a bucket of cold water — kills your inspiration boner.”

Which isn’t to say that Cabello is ignoring thoughts of how she’s perceived now that the album is finished. Introducing the throbbing “Liar” at the Apple event, she said she’d “wanted to make a sex song,” then giggled self-consciously. Asked later why she’d seemed embarrassed, she said, “I’d never said ‘sex’ in front of my fans before. It’s a different side of me.” She added that she’s also “super-conscious” of the little girls in her audience, because she has a sister who’s 10 years younger than she is.

“I don’t want to hurt their innocence,” she said. “I know a lot of people would say that’s not my responsibility, and I get that. But to me it is.” Indeed, Cabello avoided swearing on Instagram until two months ago, and she only began then “because some stuff just isn’t funny without a swear word,” she said. Plus, “I swear in real life like a sailor, and I was starting to feel like I was censoring myself.

“Sometimes you need a ‘f—,’” she said, then cringed dramatically. “Oops.”

Cabello, who was born in Cuba and moved to Miami when she was 6, acknowledges that “Romance” backs away from the Latin vibe that permeated her debut — a curious choice, perhaps, at a moment when Spanish-speaking artists like Bad Bunny and Ozuna are breaking through to American listeners.

“Whenever a producer would play me a beat that sounded like ‘Havana 2,’ I was just like, ‘I’ve done that, and this won’t be better,’” she said. She’s also heard the criticism that “Señorita,” with its mention of a “tequila sunrise,” isn’t aiming especially high.

“Shawn texted me the idea for the song, and for a while I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it,” she said. She hadn’t begun working on “Romance” yet, “and so I had no context for where the song fit for me artistically.” But as her and Mendes’ relationship developed — “We’re just two kids in love,” she said — “I thought, You know what? He and I singing together sound great. I’m not gonna overthink this.” Still, she said, she’d love to do a Spanish album in the future.

Before that, Cabello will play Cinderella in a new movie musical based on the classic fairy tale set to begin shooting in February. “Anthony, my acting coach, talks about how acting is really just listening,” she said as earnestly as any young starlet. Then she’ll tour Europe and North America behind “Romance” next summer. The far-flung gigs in Copenhagen and San Antonio will take her away from Mendes, of course. But she’ll find comfort in her songs.

“I’m so proud of the way they capture this experience,” she said. “They’ll always remind me of what’s happening between us that nobody else can see.”

“Les Misérables” is not merely named after Victor Hugo’s celebrated novel, it shares its setting and succeeds splendidly in a mutual goal.

Directed and co-written by Ladj Ly, who was born, raised and still lives in Montfermeil, the perennially impoverished Parisian banlieue or suburb where Hugo set part of his story, “Les Misérables” has exploded on the French film scene.

Snapped up by Amazon almost immediately after its Cannes debut, it won the festival’s jury prize and became France’s Oscar submission, with Ly becoming the first black French filmmaker so honored.

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The reason for all this excitement is that, like the original Hugo novel, “Les Misérables” is both culturally relevant and dramatically compelling, finding a way to balance artistic metaphor, hugely involving storytelling and criticism of a system that allows crushing poverty to survive and prosper.

Though this energetic, terrifyingly real film is Ly’s debut as a feature director, he has been making movies, mostly documentaries, for decades. In fact, a short film on the same subject was nominated for a César a couple of years ago.

Ly’s considerable skill aside, what makes “Les Misérables” such an immersive experience is the crackling sense of authenticity that is the film’s birthright.

Working with co-writers Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and cinematographer Julien Poupard, Ly proves to be a superb orchestrator of time and space, taking us through two days in and around Montfermeil’s Bosquets housing project, where the sense that things can get out of hand in a heartbeat is ever-present.

In an inspired bit of counterpoint, Ly has chosen to open “Les Misérables” on an unexpected happy note. Inspired by 1998’s World Cup, he shows neighborhood kids headed into central Paris, draping themselves in the French flag and celebrating with people of all colors as their country wins. It’s a note of beautiful unity we never get close to again.

Operating in a much more confrontational manner are the three men of the local police’s Anti-Crime Squad, who drive around in a gray Peugeot focusing on keeping a lid on things.

Brand new to the squad is Stephane (Damien Bonnard), who has transferred in from another part of France and has been paired with veterans Chris (Alexis Manenti) and Gwana (Djebril Zonga).

While Gwana is mostly cool and laid back, the volcanic Chris, who glories in his Pink Pig nickname, is anything but.

A confrontational bigot with a hair-trigger temper, he immediately starts to needle Stephane, nicknaming him “Greaser” because of his hairstyle. When the new guy questions his lack of politeness, Chris snaps, “why don’t you work as a butler in a palace.”

As Stephane is introduced at the police station, we get to meet the area’s sardonic commander (a tartly unexpected Jeanne Balibar), who emphasizes the importance of group unity.

It’s at the police station that we get our first glimpse of Issa (Issa Perica), a boy whose father is furious at him for being a perpetual troublemaker, a characterization that turns out to be all too true.

We get to observe other neighborhood kids too, running around in packs looking to amuse themselves. Key among these is Buzz (Al-Hassan Ly), a quiet type with enormous glasses whose fixation on filming everything in the neighborhood from his drone, especially girls, becomes central to the plot.

As the police motor around and the veterans show the new guy the lay of the land, we get a sense of how balkanized this area is, how many power centers there are and how little they care for one another.

The police have no use for the area’s mayor (Steve Tientcheu), whom Chris needles as “our own Obama,” but because he has his own power base they need each other. The same goes for the local crime boss and for Salah (Almamy Kanouté), an imposing individual who is associated with the powerful Muslim Brotherhood.

“Les Misérables’” plot kicks in when members of a just-arrived small traveling circus drive around the neighborhood screaming imprecations like, “whoever stole Jimmy, we’re going to eat your brains.”

Jimmy turns out to be a baby lion cub, and as the police attempt to get him back, something unforeseen and terrible happens and it is the nature of the neighborhood that each faction is desperate not to do the right thing but to find a way to use it to their advantage.

Ly says everything in the film was inspired by real events and, except for the three leads and Balibar, has cast it with non-professionals from the area.

Equally impressive, and this cannot have been easy, he is sympathetic to all sides, even the police, honoring the complexity of the situation by refusing to offer easy solutions to intractable problems.

More than anything, especially with its unnerving ending, “Les Misérables” wants us to think. What have we done as a society, what do we continue to do, what can be done to change things before it is too late.

You can take the writer out of California but you can’t take California out of the writer — or at least so I prefer to imagine, in my romantic fashion, during these dark days in which everything beautiful about the Golden State seems to be burning.

Jean Stafford was born and raised in California (on a West Covina walnut farm). While she spent her life continually moving east (to Colorado, Missouri, New York), Stafford often looked back fondly at the West’s wide amenable spaces.

In many further ways, she swung restlessly across extremes. She studied, worked and partied with both members of the Southern-based “Fugitives” (poets and critics like Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren), who argued that artful writing was more about form than experience, as well as the more East Coast-leaning Partisan Review crowd (Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy), who argued, well, the opposite.

Even her marriages charted a broad psycho-social shift: Her first was to conservative Robert Lowell, who demanded she convert with him to Catholicism and eventually divorced her. Finally, she married Manhattan Jewish journalist, A.J. Liebling, who provided a happier match. But after Liebling’s sudden death in 1963, Stafford suffered increasingly serious problems with drinking and depression, and wrote less frequently.

This excellent, handsome new edition of Stafford’s novels provides excellent testimony that her California-like embrace of extremes may be just what our culturally fractious age needs.

“Boston Adventure” (1944) stands as a textbook example of formal dexterity and invention. Protagonist Sonie Marburg is a young girl living in the working-class suburbs of Boston with an angry German shoemaker for a father, and a beautiful, emotionally unstable Russian mother. Amid all this domestic sweat and struggle, Sonie dreams of befriending an elderly resident at the local hotel where she works, in passages of black humor that will make readers laugh (and shudder) aloud. She journeys from one cold emotional landscape to another even colder one (the fate of many Stafford protagonists). But in every scene, Sonie delivers her rich perceptions in elegant, funny paragraphs, treating each room and person she meets as a fascinating alien landscape — one that can be closely observed, but never entirely understood. Sentence for sentence, “The Boston Adventure” is as beautifully composed as any American novel I have ever read.

Stafford’s second novel, “The Mountain Lion” (1947), proves she hadn’t lost her taste for extremes. She swung back westward again to the West Covina of her childhood. “Lion” concerns young people coming of age in a world that doesn’t care about them; and the dual-protagonist-siblings, Ralph and Molly, grow up trying to invent their own versions of adulthood. For Molly, it’s a secret region of poetry, fantasy and fiction; for Ralph, it’s the dusty, wide territories of hardworking, outdoor-yearning men. Like everything Stafford wrote, this is a funny, dark book, with the shadow of a great beast pacing in the high brush.

And it’s impossible to open to a paragraph that doesn’t make you want to read it out loud, such as when Molly makes her last trip home to California and notes, “Now and again her care-worn melancholy made her suddenly self-contemptuous and she brushed it off like a spider.”

With her third novel, Stafford swings East again — and by now such wide geographical shifts of attention aren’t surprising. “The Catherine Wheel” (1952) envisions adolescence as a form of slow torture twisting unusual children into ugly adult shapes and slows the narrative pace to a subjective drone of thoughts, experiences, memories, observations and reflections. It’s reminiscent of late Henry James — but unlike James, Stafford knew when it was all getting to be a bit too slow. Which is probably why this turned out to be the last of her excellent novels and she spent the rest of her career writing short stories.

It is hard to think of an American writer whose work embraced so many extremes: novels and short stories, formal excellence and experiential detail, Proustian paragraphs and Steinbeckian ranch hands, Boston and Covina. With this new “rediscovery” of her old work (I just wish there was some way Library of America could make the pages a little less tissue-papery thin!) she deserves to be embraced by readers all over again.

Complete Novels: Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion & The Catherine Wheel

By Jean Stafford

Edited by Kathryn Davis

Library of America: 894 pages; $40

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Bradfield is the author of, most recently, “Dazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog.”

LONDON — 

Clive James, an Australian journalist, joker and intellectual who had a long career as a writer and broadcaster in the U.K., has died. He was 80.

James’ representatives, United Agents, said he died Sunday at his home in Cambridge, north of London, and a private funeral was held Wednesday.

James had been diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema, and he suffered kidney failure in 2010.

“I am a man who is approaching his terminus,” James said in 2012. He later assured well-wishers that he intended to live a few more years — and he did, continuing to write and broadcast almost until the end.

“Clive died almost 10 years after his first terminal diagnosis, and one month after he laid down his pen for the last time,” United Agents said in a statement. “He endured his ever-multiplying illnesses with patience and good humor, knowing until the last moment that he had experienced more than his fair share of this ‘great, good world.’ ”

The poet, essayist, author and entertainer had a gift for tickling the divergent sensibilities of the readers of highbrow literary magazines and the audiences of Saturday night TV in Britain, his adopted country.

James was treasured for his comic gift, such as describing Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like “a brown condom stuffed with walnuts.”

In one of his best-remembered book reviews, James pronounced an official Soviet biography of President Leonid Brezhnev as so dull that “if you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.”

James, in his self-deprecating way, once imagined an acquaintance describing him as “the boy from the bush who could quote [Ludwig] Wittgenstein,” the philosopher.

He was born in 1939 in the Sydney suburb of Kogorah. He was an only child whose father survived a Japanese World War II prison camp only to die on the flight home, when his son was 6.

Though James said he had no memory of his father, he looked back on his father’s death and his mother’s despair as the defining moment of his life.

“I understood nothing except that I could not help,” he wrote in “Unreliable Memoirs,” the first of five autobiographical volumes.

“Eventually in my mid-30s I got a grip on myself,” he added. “But there can be no doubt that I had a tiresomely protracted adolescence, wasting a lot of other people’s time, patience and love.”

Christened Vivian after the Australian tennis star Vivian McGrath, James won permission from his mother to choose an unequivocally masculine name. He picked Clive from the character played by Tyrone Power in the 1942 film “This Above All.”

A scholarship for war orphans paved his way to Sydney University, for which he claimed to be unprepared. But he read hungrily, contributed to the school’s literary journal and became its editor.

After a stint at the Sydney Morning Herald, he decamped to Britain and Cambridge University. He was already bridging the worlds of academia and showbiz, and served as president in 1966-67 of the Footlights, the university club that spawned stars including Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Germaine Greer, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Despite academic success, he fell into depression in his 20s.

“The proof that I was getting ready to jump off a cliff or stick my head in an oven — that I was serious — was that I was giving my books away,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times in 2007. “It was largely because I was lost, I had no outlets, and I wasn’t expressing myself. I wasn’t doing what keeps me stable now, which is having a stage and a platform.”

James eventually found multiple platforms, writing poetry, contributing to the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books, writing books, reviewing television for the Daily Telegraph and hosting “Saturday Night Clive,” “The Clive James Show” and other TV programs.

He also formed a “fleeting friendship“ with the late Princess Diana, an experience that left him with mixed feelings.

“Even before I met her, I had already guessed that she was a handful. After I met her, there was no doubt about it. Clearly on a hair-trigger, she was unstable at best, and when the squeeze was on she was a fruitcake on the rampage. But even while reaching this conclusion I was already smitten,“ he wrote in the New Yorker magazine in 1997.

James’ best-selling book “Cultural Amnesia“ celebrated 100 people whose lives he found inspirational. While the book was favorably reviewed, he disavowed any intention to reach the cultural elite.

“It is still my mission in life to write in a way so that anyone who can read will understand that I am talking about something,“ he said on a U.S. television show. “My enemy is elevated language.“

During his long illness, James increasingly focused on writing poetry, including the poem “Japanese Maple,” which was published in the New Yorker in 2014 and became a viral sensation.

He recently wrote “Play All,” a book about binge-watching TV shows, and last month released “Somewhere Becoming Rain,” a collection of writings about the work of poet Philip Larkin.

A final volume of poems, “The Fire Of Joy,” was finished a month before his death and is due to be published next year.

In 2012, James’ more than four-decade marriage to Prudence Shaw, a specialist in Dante and early Italian literature, was shaken by the revelation of his eight-year affair with a younger Australian woman — who compounded his embarrassment by ambushing the ailing James for an Australian television program.

James and Shaw had two daughters, Claerwen and Lucinda.

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LeBron James, the next time you’re in Las Vegas, there’s a sweet “taco” with your name on it. It’s one smothered with ice cream and the L.A. Laker’s favorite cereal, which also is the pattern on his Nike-collaboration sneakers: Fruity Pebbles.

The creation debuted Nov. 19 at one of the Vegas area’s newest eateries: the Cereal Killerz Kitchen. The restaurant opened in late July in the food court of a mall in suburban Henderson, Nev., and plans a second location along the Strip in the spring.

What does it serve? Cereal, of course, 130 varieties in all. Owner Chris Burns (who likes the comical word play on “serial killers”) says guests are encouraged to mix various types of cereal into their bowls. Alongside Rice Krispies and corn flakes, visitors will find specialty brands such as Baby Shark, Cotton Candy Crunch and Hostess Donuts.

“We allow you to do things your parents would never allow you to do,” the 32-year-old says. “Here, we let you use your imagination. You can mix three to five different options in the same bowl.”

A three-item bowl costs $5; a mix of five cereals costs $7, milk included. Chocolate, strawberry and nondairy milks are available for an additional charge. “Whatever you can dream up, we can do it,” Burns says.

But don’t let the crunchy stuff fool you; only about 30% of Burns’ business comes from cereal eaters. He also creates dreamy shakes by using a drill-style milk shake machine to blend cereal, ice cream and other ingredients. Chocolate, strawberry and vanilla shakes with up to three cereals mixed in cost $7 each. Add $3 for Burns’ one-of-a-kind creations, such as the Pop-Tart Shake.

“It is crazy,” he says. “We’ll take ice cream, any Pop-Tart cereal that we have, and then we’ll throw a whole Pop-Tart in there. Then we’ll top it with a whole Pop-Tart and fresh strawberries.”

The Peanut Butter Lover shake uses “seven different peanut butter cereals mixed in with Reese’s Pieces [and] topped with a Reese’s [peanut butter] cup and Reese’s whipped cream,” Burns says, adding that a scoop of peanut butter is blended in.

Burns, a self-confessed big basketball fan, created the LeBron James Taco to honor one of his favorite players. He starts with a taco-shaped waffle cone, slathers it with white chocolate. As that shell chills, Burns mixes Fruity Pebbles and ice cream in his special, $10,000 blender and fills the “taco,” topping it off with whipped cream, more Fruity Pebbles and a drizzle of strawberry syrup.

The dessert fit for an NBA superstar is priced at $8. “We gotta’ get him over here,” Burns says.

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Cereal Killerz is located in the Galleria at Sunset in Henderson, and come April or May, will be at a shopping mall on Las Vegas Boulevard. ”It’s definitely going to be big,” Burns says. “With all the tourists from foreign countries … we’ll be offering something that they can’t get at home.”

Burns — who said he would eat cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner if his wife would allow it — spent several years coming up with a concept for his own business, finally settling on a cereal cafe. “It was just something everybody could connect with,” he says. “It’s not like Mexican food or sushi, so it’s just something literally everyone can connect with.”

There are 15 to 20 cereal eateries around the country, including Gizmo’s Cereal Bar in downtown L.A. Burns believes he offers the largest selection of cereals, noting that the Cereal Box in suburban Denver comes in second with more than 100.

“They’re definitely starting to pop up. It’s one of those new trends,” he says.

Info: Cereal Killerz Kitchen is open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays.

There’s a lot of hype over Black Friday-Cyber Monday sales, and hotels, cruise lines and tour operators are no exception. You can find good deals with your travel dollars between Nov. 29 and Dec. 2 (some sales have expanded dates), but how good?

Unlike airlines, most travel retailers let you know in advance what discounts you can expect to find if you book during this year’s annual buy-athon. Insider tip: You can usually find a 15% to 25% discount on hotels at other times of the year. Shop around for deeper discounts, particularly at luxury hotels that may now be within reach.

Hotels

Many California hotels will put their rooms on sale this weekend. Here are California properties with some of the deepest discounts.

The Monarch Beach Resort in Dana Point is offering 50% off best available room prices for stays through Dec. 31, 2020. That means you have a whole year to plan. Book between now and Dec. 2 at bit.ly/monarchbeachdeal.

Looking for a quick December getaway? Estancia La Jolla Hotel & Spa in La Jolla offers a SoCal Winter deal that takes up to 20% off room prices and throws in a $25 food and beverage credit. Room prices start at $160 instead of $199 (excluding tax and fees). Book by Dec. 31 for stays through Jan. 5 at bit.ly/estanciadeal.

For its seasonal deal, Surf & Sand Resort in Laguna Beach takes 50% off its best available room rates and waives resort and parking fees. Book on Black Friday (Nov. 29) and Cyber Monday (Dec. 2) for stays through March 31 at surfandsandresort.com.

The historic Mission Inn Resort & Spa in Riverside offers up to 40% off for stays between Jan. 2 and July 31. Discounted room prices start at $139 a night at missioninn.com. (While you’re there, you can take a 75-minute walking tour of the inn for $20 too.)

Hard Rock Hotel San Diego in the city’s Gaslamp Quarter will offer rooms starting at $99 a night from 12:01 a.m. Pacific time on Nov. 29 through midnight Dec. 2. It’s good for travel on selected dates through April 13. Book at hardrockhotelsd.com.

Rancho Bernardo Inn on a 265-acre property in San Diego will take 50% off its best available rates and waive parking and resort fees for travel through March 31. Book between Nov. 29 and Dec. 2 at ranchobernardoinn.com.

Pacifica Hotels has coastal hotels in San Francisco, Central California, Los Angeles and San Diego as well as on Hawaii Island and Maui in Hawaii. The Cyber Monday sale on Dec. 2 will take 40% off room prices for stays from Dec. 2 through March 14. The sale starts at midnight Pacific time Monday until 11:59 p.m. at pacificahotels.com.

Calistoga Ranch in the wine country town of Calistoga offers half-off for Sunday through Thursday stays between Dec. 1 and March 17. Discounted prices start at $599. Use the code “CYBER” between now and Dec. 6 at aubergeresorts.com/calistogaranch.

Solage, also in Calistoga, offers 40% off room prices for Sunday through Thursday stays, starting at the discounted price of $299 for travel between Dec. 1 and March 17. Use the code “CYBER” to book between now and Dec. 6 at aubergeresorts.com/solage.

Also in wine country, MacArthur Place Hotel & Spa in Sonoma takes 50% off reservations when you book between now and Dec. 2 with the code “BLACK50.” Good for stays from Dec. 3 through Nov. 25, 2020 (blackout dates apply). Book at macarthurplace.com

Tours

Check out your favorite tour outfitter for discounts too.

TourRadar offers up to 60% off multiday 2020 tours to various destinations around the world. Book between now and Dec. 3 at tourradar.com.

Starting Nov. 27 through Nov. 29, couples receive a $1,400 discount on selected off-season tours at Go Ahead Tours. The company also offers other discounts, such as no single supplements.

STA Travel offers 40% off G Adventures and Contiki Tours for younger travelers. Book between Nov. 29 and Dec. 2 at statravel.com/specials.

Luxury outfitter Abercrombie & Kent offers up to 44% off limited-edition Private Journeys to Vietnam, Machu Picchu in Peru, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Kenya and other destinations. Example: Seven days on a custom trip to Paris and Amsterdam costs $4,895 per person instead of $8,795. Book 6 a.m. Pacific time Dec. 2 through 2 p.m. Dec. 6 at abercrombiekent.com.

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