Clive James has ready for publication a new collection of poems, called Sentenced to Life. These contain some of those personal reflections on mortality for which he has been celebrated – a new vindication of his greatness as a writer and public figure who surpasses the silliness of being a “national treasure”. In interviews, he has wryly commented on the fact that he is still here; that he has become the living “late Clive James”, and that he has now cemented his reputation as a “late developer”. What he has, in fact, achieved is rare: like his namesake Henry, he has a late style. His poems about death have the accessibility, simplicity and impact of his light verse. I am one of those people who loves talking and writing about Clive James. I have never met him, though once as a student I asked for his autograph in the Lion Yard shopping arcade in Cambridge (my toes curl at that memory), and he once wrote me a letter of encouragement in the 1990s, when I was being sued by a Conservative politician. Any new publication from James is something to celebrate, but what I’d most like to see is his first volume of autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, put on the GCSE list as a set text. It is his prose masterpiece, and an example of English comic writing that should be taught to schoolchildren alongside the works of Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse.

Me and Bobby G

I recently contributed a blogpost to a Guardian series entitled The film that makes me cry. Everyone has an opinion on this; I chose The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – the brilliantly drawn story of a virtually incapacitated stroke victim – though there were many others I could have picked, including ET and the stiff-upper-lip wartime drama The Cruel Sea. But I found myself brooding about a genre that seems to have been in abeyance since the 1970s: pop songs that make you cry – the tear-jerker single, the top-40 weepie. The other day I found myself on YouTube, where distant musical memories can be revived with eerie speed and in unhealthy detail. I listened to Bobby Goldsboro’s outrageously mawkish Me and the Elephants from 1976, about a guy who can’t stop remembering a magical afternoon at the zoo with his ex-girlfriend. He can’t forget; neither, tragically, can the elephants. I sat down to listen to Me and the Elephants in a mood of playful satire. By the end, I was a mess of slushy Kleenex. YouTube is a nuclear waste dump of buried pop-culture emotion that should stay buried.

Going forward, multiplied

I started off being grumpily annoyed by it; now I find it strangely reassuring. It’s the radio and TV interviewee habit of adding the phrase “going forward” to any sentence. “We have a new regulatory system in place” becomes “We have new regulatory system in place, going forward.” This plumps up any platitude with a spurious sense of progress, and suggests the speaker should not be challenged or interrupted because he or she is still in the mysterious process of “going forward”.

All sorts of phrases are given a surreal fillip with this phrase: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, going forward.” Or: “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time, going forward.” There’s the final line of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, going forward.”

But the most piquant application is the final sentence of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past … going forward.”