The remarkable life of Clive James has taken yet another turn. After being told he would soon die, new medication has extended his life and prompted a surge of creativity. Fiona Gruber visits the venerated author and broadcaster in his Cambridge home for an intimate conversation.

What is it worth, then, this insane last phase When everything about you goes downhill? This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze And feel its grandeur, even against your will, As it reminds you, just by being there, That it is here we live, or else nowhere. Clive James, Event Horizon (2013)

If Clive James were to write another memoir it might be called The Art of Dying.

As my friend P.J. O'Rourke once warned me, 'you've got to soft-pedal this death's-door stuff Clive, people are going to get impatient'. Clive James

Since being diagnosed with leukaemia and emphysema in 2010, the broadcaster, critic, author and poet has been on the point of expiring for several much-publicised years.

It's been touch-and-go several times since and as recently as March, his condition worsening, James gave a series of interviews saying he was near death, but grateful for life.

A media flurry of last interviews and elegiac articles followed.

Then, in a lucky turn that seems part of what the kid from Kogarah, NSW, would regard as a disproportionately lucky existence, he's now been given a new lease of life thanks to a drug that targets his particular brand of blood cancer.

I'm thinking about this as I ring the doorbell of his house in Cambridge in the pouring English rain.

I'm aware that this isn't the family home, because in 2012 he had an excruciatingly public bust-up with his wife, the Dante scholar Prue Shaw. Following revelations of a long affair, she turfed him out.

He is now living on his own, with one of his daughters living next door. The door opens and James is standing there in a baggy black fleece and trousers.

He's a bit pale (no English tan) and has an livid blotch on his bald pate but that, he explains, chuckling, is due to the recent removal of an old-fashioned melanoma—the legacy of a childhood spent in a suburban Sydney backyard.

Yes, he's feeling a lot better, but he's concerned that some people might suspect him of over-egging the dying bit.

'As my friend [the American political satirist] P.J. O'Rourke once warned me, "you've got to soft-pedal this death's-door stuff Clive, people are going to get impatient.'"

He gives another throaty, slightly breathy laugh.

As he leads me into his large book-lined study and jokes about the abysmal weather, the familiarity of his twanging Aussie drawl instantly conjures up his dominating TV presence.

I'm reminded that before the Australian accent became famous the world over for its upward inflection, James gave the deadpan downward inflection a very Aussie spin.

Despite, or as it turns out, largely because of his marital and health troubles, he's had what he calls a new lease of creativity.

'The danger of being a writer is that you relish it; you screw up and then you think "hurrah, now I've got something to write about — screwing up,'" he says.

In the last five years, James has published several highly acclaimed volumes of essays and verse, including a translation from the Italian version of Dante's Divine Comedy, an endeavour that was, he has claimed, a love letter to his wife as well as the fulfilment of a long-held ambition.

In the UK and Australia during the 1980s and 1990s, James, who had cut his journalistic teeth as the witty, irreverent and compelling TV critic for the Observer newspaper in London, was everywhere.

His life in the 'crystal bucket' included late-night chat shows, programs exploring the wilder shores of TV around the world, travel adventures in exotic locations and a series on fame in the 20th century.

His closing monologue for that series ended with the observation that 'achievement without fame can be a rewarding life, while fame without achievement is no life at all.'

Although his first collection of poetry was published in 1975 and he's had a steady stream of publications throughout his career, James measures achievement in scholarly and creative writing rather than broadcasting. He does admit a level of pride of his 'postcards' TV travel series though.

If he had died in 2010, there would have been far less serious scholarship and literary meditation.

The years he has spent sick have insulated him from the hurly burly of London media land and decades of international travel. They've also allowed him to re-establish himself as a serious writer.

He says he's always been a show-off and loves writing about himself.

James has written five volumes of autobiography. Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England and May Week Was In June cover his early life in Australia, time in London and at Cambridge University, while North Face of Soho and The Blaze of Obscurity canvass his later adventures in the media.

His most recent works, the Poetry Notebook 2006-2014, his collection of verse Sentenced to Life and his recommendations on favourite books Latest Readings are autobiographical in another way.

They include many poems about death and ones of atonement for infidelities (he and his wife are on much better terms and dine regularly, he is pleased, if careful to report).

This is a life constructed through a voracious exploration of literature. Over the course of our conversation, we roam from the ancient Romans Catullus and Ovid, to the Balkan and Levant Trilogies of Olivia Manning via Evelyn Waugh. Anthony Powell and Billy Bunter.

He reads some poetry and we look out the window at the little Japanese maple tree about which he wrote last year.

The tree was a gift from one of his daughters and his poem, Japanese Maple, achieved a giddy amount of attention , going viral and creating a best seller out of Sentenced to Life.

One of the stanzas reads:

Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame. What I must do is live to see that. That will end the game For me, though life continues all the same; Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes, A final flood of colours will live on As my mind dies, Burned by my vision of a world that shone So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

He's rather embarrassed by that now; the northern hemisphere autumn came and went, now another is on its way and he's still here.

So is the tree. He compares it to a needy film star.

'It's like Lindsay Lohan,' he jokes. 'It needs a lot of attention, people pointing at it.'

It's time to go. James says he has half the energy he used to have and there are several books still to write.

He's chuckling, but it's not a joke.

James might have a life sentence, but he plans to keep the grim reaper waiting as long as he can.

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