I first encountered Clive James via his Sunday night ITV show, where he gently (and often not so gently) mocked foreign TV. He was, for me, a smug yet wry presence who allowed us to laugh at funny foreigners – I beg his forgiveness if I was missing some subtlety in his gags, but though the recall is fond hindsight says that it wasn’t especially edifying. I had no idea of his extensive critical body of work, his volumes of memoir nor his poetry. This is a man who smoothly went from weekly gags about Japanese game shows to learning foreign languages simply to appreciate works of literature in their original form, the dictionary definition of a polymath. It’s no wonder the decline in his health and personal troubles have attracted so much sympathy – his eventual absence will leave a great gap in the culture of his adopted country.

From The Land Of Shadows focuses on James’ literary criticism of the late 70s and early 80s. The risk with books of this nature is that they’ll date badly. Critical judgments will have been rendered null by the dead hand of posterity, great works being egregiously ignored and too much attention lavished on books now long forgotten. This is an inevitability, and one which is most obvious here in the last of the four sections, which concentrates on Russian literature. James paid a great deal of attention to literary works dealing with Soviet Russia, mainly by dissidents. Unarguably it was important at the time, but unforeseeable historical shifts dictate that they now don’t carry the apparent import they did then. But where the subject matter has faded, the critical mind is imperishable. James is able to divine deeper insights from these works, meaning the modern reader isn’t simply wading through reams of now irrelevant prose about obscure works. In dealing with the art of Soviet Russia he’s able to condemn the art produced, whilst remaining entirely compassionate about the very human reactions of artists to circumstances. Somehow his verdicts can be all the more cutting for that.

It’s not all a desperate desire to educate about Russian literature and now obscure poets though. Unlike many of his fellow critics, he’s capable of understanding both why Judith Krantz was a technically terrible writer but enormously popular. What still makes these pieces so readable, even after more than thirty years, is that James knows that boring the reader is equally a sin of writer and critic. Hence his treating writing as a performance piece, replete with gags, epigrams, stylish turns of phrase, and punchlines that mean even his old writing remains relevant. Hence even the slightest pieces remain worth reading, and when a full blown routine comes off, such as in his takedown of the official biography of Brezhnev, it’s as entertaining as any contemporary comic routine.

Ultimately, James’s greatness lies in his generosity, the strand that unites his best work. He takes the critic’s role as that of a guide as to the merits (or otherwise) of art, not someone who tells you what to think about things. It’s why there’s infinitely more merit here than in (say) AA Gill’s entire career. The likes of Gill show contempt for things they don’t understand, or dislike, and sheer volume dilutes their venom and neuters them as a critic. James always engages with the medium he’s criticising, always appreciates the possibilities of that medium and, crucially, can still see why appeal to a mass audience bypasses the standards of criticism. It means his disappointment carries more weight than either a Gill-ish snob or a lowbrow tabloid reviewer. We’re really going to miss him when he’s gone. ( )