I read it and I laugh out loud, and some of it I find quite moving, and I think quite a lot of other people like it, so don’t take any notice at all – don’t worry about it’.” Dennis subsides, overcome by this Wolfian rant. “So it was very helpful to me”.Had he received no reviews at all in the UK? “Well,” he says guardedly. “It depends what you mean by a review.”"I mean, a serious review…”"Ah-hah!” shouts Dennis, as if I’d fallen into an elephant trap. “This guy in the white suit says, ‘What kind of literary criticism have you had of this book?’, and I said, ‘I’ve had a lot of very nice write-ups, but I haven’t had a single review – apart from one in The Wall Street Journal, by our old friend Michael Horovitz [the British poet], saying ‘This man is a philistine and until he stops rhyming, he’s going to remain a philistine’ So no, I said, there hasn’t been much criticism. He’s taken every thee, thine and thou out of the collection, and removed 40 buts.

When he takes them out, he writes in the margin, “stop throat-clearing”.He has received, he says, thousands of letters from readers who’ve found his stuff amusing, moving or inspiring. Among the more glamorous of the fans is Tom Wolfe, the novelist-dandy, who came to a poetry reading. So we’ve the Romans to blame for all the posturing.”What has he discovered about himself as a poet? “I don’t sit down, as I used to, and say, ‘I’m going to write a villanelle’ The professionals I talk to, they say ‘No no, you must only write when you want to write’. And I say, but I always want to write! I’ve learned the craft I’ve done the look-at-me stuff. After the first 400 poems, the form stops dictating the content.” He still lays aside four hours of his busy working day just for writing verse Does it still come as easy? “No, but then I’m not as easily pleased. My fingers hit just as many keys as they used to, but a much larger percentage goes straight into the bin.” His editor is the poet and Faber author, Simon Rae “Yes, he’s still with me.

Felix is in the garden, presiding over an al fresco lunch with a bottle of Chablis ros?He is thinner than I remember, but his hair is more straggly and his beard longer and more unkempt than you’d expect from a business mogul worth £500m. Has his poetry become more politically engag?Can I ask you what that means, please?” he asks, jutting his chin I told him. “There’s a poem about the horrible lies told by all politicians Politicians have always been the same They’re just people who are trying to get your vote I suppose the Romans were the same. It takes a few minutes before you register whom he most resembles: Saddam Hussein, just after they found him in the bunker and began sticking torches down his throat.Saddam is, in fact, the subject of the longest poem in the next collection, an extraordinary attempt to think inside the mind of a tyrant. It has a tragic history: the original structure was burnt to the ground just three weeks before its completion date in March 1997 The fire raged for 14 hours. Any other man would have detected the work of Providence and given up, but Dennis does not bow to fate.

He met a local farmer who told him: “Get on with it and rebuild the blighter better next time.” So he did It took a year. Another 700 oak trees went into its construction, even down to the wooden nails, joists and flanges that hold the thing together.The great man is located 100 yards away in the old manor house which is his centre of operations. Now Felix Dennis has arrived to confound that fantasy by making it real.Meeting the great man involves a drive up from London to Warwickshire with Louis, his phenomenally cool chief chauffeur, in a Bentley Turbo It’s one of Felix’s seven cars. (He has quelled an understandable desire to put a sticker in the back window saying “One of my other cars is a Rolls Phantom”, which it is.) You reach his 650-acre country estate of Dorsington, 10 miles or so from Stratford, and look around, nosily, for signs of wealth, of rich man’s folly They aren’t hard to find. Soon you’re inspecting his magnificent folly, Highfield, a hectically over-the-top shrine to the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson, an ornate swimming-pool-cum-sauna-cum-bar’n'gym’n'cinema crashout-relaxation zone with an hourglass pool, an ornate aquarium, a library, jukebox and lots of sculptures (Stevenson himself stands in the doorway, carved in Lincolnshire limewood).There isn’t anything metal in it, not a nail, not a screw – the biggest barn (as its owner tells you proudly) entirely made of oak frames to be built in the UK for 300 years. There will be a glittery launch at the In and Out Club in St James’s Square, London, followed by a nationwide reading tour.