Dr Johnson is one of Clive James’ favourites. Revisiting Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, he is amused to read about a chap called Edmund Smith, who had “all the talents”, said Johnson, “but achieved nothing with them”. This provokes a com­plementary aphorism about some of James’ own (generously unidentified) contempor­aries who had been “so gifted they practically had to fight for obscurity … I still find it remarkable that they attained their aim”.This is the kind of writing we have always appreciated him for: perceptive, acerbic, laconic, witty. “If a sentence is wordy,” he opines, “then it’s never witty.” That’s probably true, but what is certain is that James now has neither the time