There must be poets writing today who can’t remember a time when Clive James wasn’t dying. Indeed, his capitulation to the leukaemia and emphysema his doctors diagnosed in 2010 was so protracted, and his willingness to write and talk about it so inexhaustible, that in the last few years an element of doubt crept in, with some cynics suggesting that perhaps he wasn’t sick at all, but merely pretending to be so to burnish his bardic credentials.