Clive James

More than one hundred essays organized by quotations from A-Z discuss some of the great thinkers, artists, humanists, and philosophers of the twentieth century.

Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

Cultural Amnesia

Gavin

I love James because, though he is a literary intellectual through and through, he makes room for the other half of the human mind. He is still an arts supremacist - this personal portrait of the century contains no scientists, and many actors and novelists and politicians, but he is at least aware of the narrowness of this.

Cultural Amnesia is an invitation to the humanities; defence of philosophy and art against politics; an attack on the hypocrisy of the left (Kollontai, Sartre, Brecht, Saramago), on the heartlessness of the right (Junger, Brasillach, Pound, Heidegger); a dark, teeming biography of C20th humanism and its enemies; a reading list for all of us bewildered by the bullshit critical fortresses of serious writing about art and history. James is deeply opinionated, often funny and occasionally heartbreaking.

Of “the relationship between Hitler’s campaign on the eastern front and Richard Burton’s pageboy haircut”. It’s full of faded and non-Anglophone stars (Egon Friedell, Arthur Schnitzler, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Paz, Urena), villains (Brassilach, Celine, Pound, Sartre, Brecht), pop-defining celebrities (Beatrix Potter, Dick Cavett, Michael Mann) and sad outrage. 

It’s also or really an autobiography, a list of the people and one-liners that struck James as he travelled the century. WW2 and the Soviet Empire dominate as the most deadly instances of the theme “how politics invaded art and came close to killing it”. 

Other themes: irrational violence, the nonconformist left, collaborators and fellow-travellers, Jewish achievements, the failure of totalitarian simplicity, ‘the American century’, rise and fall of jazz. He falls for clash-of-civilisation talk a bit, but he’s never conservative without a reason. I think what I love about him is that he stands up for boring truths – ‘it takes another power to keep a power in check’, “the law’s imperfections are tokens of its necessity” etc. 

For every villain we are given a counter exemplar: Marc Bloch, Sophie Scholl, Jorge Borges... 

This is my second read-through in five years; I expect to read it again in another five.

Michael Ernst

Seth Kalback

Keith Lang

Katie Day

A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is the book Clive James has always wanted to write. Organized from A through to Z, and containing over one hundred essays, its the ultimate guide to the twentieth century, illuminating the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers. From Louis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, its a book for our timesand, indeed, for all time.

Cultural Amnesia Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

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