Australian journalist, writer and wit Clive James dies at 80

Clive James, an Australian journalist, joker and intellectual who had a long career as a writer and broadcaster in the U.K., has died. He was 80.

James' representatives, United Agents, said he died Sunday at his home in Cambridge, north of London, and a private funeral was held Wednesday. James been diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema, and he suffered kidney failure in 2010.

"I am a man who is approaching his terminus," James said in 2012. He later assured well-wishers that he intended to live a few more years and he did, continuing to write and broadcast until almost the end.

Clive died almost 10 years after his first terminal diagnosis, and one month after he laid down his pen for the last time, United Agents said in a statement.

He endured his ever-multiplying illnesses with patience and good humor, knowing until the last moment that he had experienced more than his fair share of this 'great, good world.'
James was treasured for his comic gift, such as describing Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like "a brown condom stuffed with walnuts."
In one of his best-remembered book reviews, James pronounced an official Soviet biography of President Leonid Brezhnev as so dull that "if you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead."
"Eventually in my mid-30s I got a grip on myself," he added. "But there can be no doubt that I had a tiresomely protracted adolescence, wasting a lot of other people's time, patience and love."
"It was largely because I was lost, I had no outlets, and I wasn't expressing myself. I wasn't doing what keeps me stable now, which is having a stage and a platform."
"It is still my mission in life to write in a way so that anyone who can read will understand that I am talking about something," he said on a U.S. television show. "My enemy is elevated language."