Ironically, Cultural Amnesia probably makes a better impression if the gallery of characters isn't that familiar, if the people he introduces are new (as way well be the case for many readers) -- i.e. part of that 'cultural amnesia' he's concerned with. As a journalist and critic, a premature post-modernist, I was often criticized in my turn for talking about the construction of a poem and of a Grand Prix racing car in the same breath, or of treating gymnasts and high divers (in my daydreams, I astonish the Olympic medalist Greg Louganis) as if they were practising the art of sculpture. It was a sore point, and often the sore point reveals where the real point is. Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities: humanism was the connection between them. Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind . . . but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it." In the absence of an intelligible argument, or through line, in a volume that never quite dispels the suspicion that the author is frugally recycling some ancient intellectual compost, James and his editors have resorted to a helpful alphabetical arrangement, in which the essential link is its author's autodidactic fervour. The disproportion of gravy to beef makes Cultural Amnesia a wonderful book for a long afternoon in a left-bank cafe, or a transatlantic plane ride, but perverse and sometimes baffling to fans who might have been hoping for a Jamesian summation." - Robert McCrum, The Observer Vivian James was spared further feminisation when Gone With the Wind was released. “After Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O’Hara, the name became irrevocably a girl’s name no matter how you spelled it,” he wrote, so his mother let him become Clive after a character in a Tyrone Power movie.

Cultural Amnesia - Clive james

Organised alphabetically by surname, this almanac invites you to share in the connections James draws, and to make your own – whether you read cover-to-cover, or allow curiosity to guide you. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, public memoir and personal record – and provides a field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now. An original haiku to commemorate my inability to complete this irritating tome. I had earnestly embarked on the promised 'crash course in civilization' as advised by J.M.Coetzee, or as 'Notes in the margin of my time' as my second edition offers, not 'Necessary Memories....' together with the same lightbulb picture.If this weren’t bad enough, we are told that Waugh “was the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century,” (p. 797), followed with “Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English; he stands at the height to English prose; its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.” (p. 799). Shakespeare and Waugh, I guess, then everybody else. For those for whom the majority or all are more or less familiar it's harder to see quite as much to it, and while the individual pieces are almost all worthwhile the sum doesn't add up quite as convincingly. After the liberation of Paris in 1944 [Sartre] called, in his capacity as a Resistance fighter, for punishment to be vented on those among his fellow literati who had collaborated with the Nazis. The question of how much Resistance fighting he had actually done did not impede his post-war climb to prominence." James claimed to have an “ungovernable ego” but was quite capable of uxoriousness. He was married to Prue Shaw, a Cambridge scholar, with whom he had two daughters: Claerwen and Lucinda. James protected all three from media intrusion, though he gave an insight into his admiration for his wife when he produced her book on Dante for an interviewer: “That’s the real McCoy. That will always be there. The kind of stuff I do is more conjectural. I am still trying to impress her.” He once said: “I think marriage civilised me. It may sound sexist, but it is one of the roles of women to civilise men.” A lifetime in the making and containing over one hundred essays, this is a definitive guide to twentieth-century culture. James catalogues and explores the careers of many of the century's greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers, with illuminating excursions into the minds of those historical figures – from Sir Thomas Browne to Montesquieu – who paved the way. Altogether, it is an illuminating work of extraordinary erudition.

sneer from the late Christopher Hitchens Some holiday sneer from the late Christopher Hitchens

After a life of misery, Anne de Gaulle, who had a severe case of Down's syndrome, died choking in her father's arms. She was twenty years old. At her funeral, de Gaulle is reputed to have said, 'Now she is like the others.' The awful beauty of that remark lies in how in how it hints at what he so often felt. Wanting her to be like the others . . . must have been the dearest wish of his private life." It is a continual concern of the book to demand what moral responsibilities an intellectual should have when faced with totalitarianism. It's this approach which has led to James's much commented-on demonization of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is ‘a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil’, ‘the most conspicuous example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization’. Watching him lay into someone like this is great fun, not least because it gives you a few ideas of what to say to the next Sartre-nut who corners you at a party. Sometimes he seems to hold these people up to some very demanding standards: he's convincing on Sartre's feeble response to Nazism, but surely it's a bit much to question why Wittgenstein never mention the Fascists in Philosophische Untersuchungen, a work of pure linguistic philosophy? A major theme of the book is: doing the right thing, and James is pretty hard on several authors who he feels didn't.Cultural Amnesia" is a series of short essays inspired by aphorisms, well-crafted sentences, or simply neat ideas from a wide array of writers, artists, thinkers, critics, celebrities, or otherwise historical figures. If there is any overarching theme, it is a championing of humanism and the defense of liberal democracy against totalitarian ideologies. James does an admirable job of explaining why such a defense, in this day and age, is still necessary. James offers an interesting mix of good and bad guys, and it makes for a good overview of all that went wrong in the 20th century, especially from the intellectual angle. Elsewhere he mentions that a custom-made suit he bought in Italy was from the same tailor used by Gorbachev; said tailor mentioned James and Gorbachev share the exact same measurements (thank God we weren’t informed as to whether both gentlemen “dressed” to the same trouser leg). A letter written to James by Philip Larkin is mentioned, apparently so James can note that said letter is preserved in the National State Royal Archives of the New South Wales Repository for Fossils and Culture or some such place. From the French viewpoint, liberalism had been able to do so little in staving off the kind of Nazi brand of totalitarianism, it was thought that only another brand of absolute power--the Soviet Union--could fill the vacuum."

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the

The pieces outweigh the whole, but that's also enough for considerable reading pleasure and thought-provoking. James was born in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. His mother, Minora (nee Darke), named her only child Vivian, after the male star of the 1938 Australian Davis cup team. It could have been worse. There was, James noted in Unreliable Memoirs (1979), a famous Australian boy whose father named him after his campaigns across the Western Desert: he was called William Bardia Escarpment Qattara Depression Mersa Matruh El Alamein Benghazi Tripoli Harris.

This book should come with a warning label on it. If you are anything like me, reading it will make your to-read shelf grow tremendously.