The writer was buried at the weekend in Colombo beneath a gravestone which reads: "Here lies Arthur C Clarke. He never grew up and did not stop growing." Graveyards and cemeteries are out of fashion these days, and so, sadly but inevitably, are headstones and the epitaphs that mark them. Yet a few expressive words like these on a tombstone can still cast a spell. Writers like Clarke have an obvious advantage. "Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by." says the resonant gravestone of WB Yeats, and even the roar from the nearby freeway is stilled by F Scott Fitzgerald's tomb: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Emily Dickinson's "Called back" is even more incisively poignant. Sadly, Groucho Marx was not allowed to rest beneath "Please excuse me, I can't stand up" as he apparently desired, while Spike Milligan ("I told you I was ill") and WC Fields ("I would rather be living in Philadelphia") ran into difficulties trying to have the last laugh too. Still, at least they got into the epitaph anthologies, alongside Alexander the Great ("A tomb now suffices for him for whom the world was not enough"), John Keats ("Here lies one whose name was writ in water") and Christopher Wren ("If you seek his monument, look around you"). Tony Blair may be heading for the Wonder Book of Best Epitaphs eventually too, especially if he insists that his tomb bears the last words he uttered in the House of Commons: "That's it. The end."