Clive James was a television critic, a poet, a memoirist, a broadcaster and a literary scholar, and he insisted that the same intelligence should be brought to all of it. His television columns for The Observer in the 1970s remain the funniest criticism written about the medium; his verdict on Barbara Cartland's eyes is still quoted. Cultural Amnesia (2007) is his summa: 106 essays on figures from Anna Akhmatova to Zinoviev, arranged alphabetically, each starting from a quotation and moving wherever the argument leads. The book is a defence of liberal humanism assembled deliberately out of the twentieth century's wreckage, and an argument that culture survives only in the memories of individuals who bother to keep it. Unreliable Memoirs (1980), on his Sydney childhood, sold in enormous numbers and started a five-volume autobiography. He translated Dante's Divine Comedy into quatrains in 2013. Diagnosed with leukaemia in 2010, he wrote about dying for nine more years — including "Japanese Maple", published in The New Yorker — and died in 2019.