Painter, draughtsman, printmaker and writer on art, born in Cardiff. He studied at the College of Art there, 1978–9, Central School of Art, 1979–82, and Royal College of Art, 1983–6. He wrote critically for London Magazine, Times Literary Supplement, Burlington Magazine and other publications, and in 1992 his Engaging Images: Practical Criticism and Visual Art, was published. James was critic-in-residence at Kingston University, 1995, and painter-in-residence at Glasgow School of Art in 1996. In that year James gave The Stanley Picker Lecture at Kingston, in which he questioned supposed oppositions between the traditional and avant-garde, through an examination of failures in art criticism and of the tendency towards literalism in contemporary art.