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For Clive James, a sense of humour was just good manners

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An exemplary critic, Clive laughed hard at himself and embraced his readers in their common failings

Clive James never failed to get a joke. Or to go on to make a better one. This wasn’t because he was overly competitive: rather, like Dr Johnson, whom he often quoted, he believed that conversation obliged us to keep the ball in the air. People lacking the grace that is a sense of humour also lacked common sense, he once told Martin Amis. “A sense of humour,” he went on, “is nothing but common-sense dancing.” Since he loved the tango – perhaps because it, too, is conversation – it is hard not to put a picture to this. Only his was more than a common sense: it was a most uncommon genius for expressing subtle thought in the language of men speaking to men. The word for this isn’t populism: for him it was, as a matter of principle, intellectual good manners.

Manners mattered to him. His talk was never coarse. Many years ago, at a dinner table, he told the woman sitting opposite him that he wanted to bite her. The woman was my wife. He was exhilarated after a successful television programme. We’d all been drinking. And he was sending himself up. He knew his weakness. Countless times, in his final anguished poems, he punished himself for it, enumerating his wrongs, above all the wrong of inconstancy: “I broke faith when it suited me.”

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