Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

He is known as a wit, but the melancholic Philip Larkin is among his passions.

He's as much at home writing poems or poetry criticism as a television newspaper column.

He loves London's 18th century coffee house culture, for all that he was born in a Sydney suburb,

and he declares an undiminished love of the roar of the crowd and the smell of grease paint, even as he lives

quietly and terminally ill in Cambridge. My guest this evening is Clive James, writer, translator,

of Dante amongst much else, as well as television presenter. He was born in 1939, moved to England in 62,

and has maintained an extraordinary flow of writing since then,

poetry, criticism, journalism.

He was the observer's television critic for ten years,

as well as the much-celebrated unreliable memoirs,

which conjures up his early life in Australia,

a time of the death of his father in a plane crash after being released from a Japanese war camp.

Clive James has always embraced low as well as high culture, past as well as present,

and his most recent book Poetryetry Notebook, is no exception.

It gathers together some of his essays on poetry from one on his much-loved Richard Wilbur to an

argument about John Milton. I went to his house to talk with him about his life and poetry,

for him bedrock and touchstone.

I said that I'd have to learn poetry by heart as a child in school, had he?

The Australian schools, we usually had to learn to recite a few lines.

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