WHEN I FIRST read this magnificent line, the second half of it begged to be the title of a book. I copied the line into an early instalment of my journal, so it must have been when I was at Cambridge, where I had a brief period one winter of joining Browne’s collected works in Pembroke Library after the early nightfall, as if those moulting leather-bound volumes were a gang of old drinking chums. At the time I had no idea what kind of book mine would be. The phrase was a cap looking for a head to fit. Later on, when I was assembling my first book of television criticism, it took me a while to remember that there was a suitable title all set to go. Visions Before Midnight seemed just right: the television programmes were visions, they happened before midnight, and the falling phrase had something in it of a civilization coming to an end, which was roughly the way the BBC sports commentators made me feel. However, underlying this case study in oppression is the broader theme of the struggle of Western liberal humanism against various forms of totalitarianism, and this usefully explains why among those profiled are Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sophie Scholl, Leon Trotsky, Mario Vargas Llosa, Czeslaw Milosz, Raymond Aron, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Brasillach, to name but a few, protagonists on one side or another of this struggle. The humanism in question, though, is a peculiar, idiosyncratic, eccentric version, albeit one explicitly related to “civilization” and civilizing activities such as the arts and humanities. In his introductory chapter, James writes: I learned to be a performer. I have to perform. If there's a limelight, I step into it, but I by no means found it comfortable. I learned to do it when I realized I needed it. I could only express myself by performing — and that's still true. I learned to do it when I realized I needed it. I could only express myself by performing — and that's still true.

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." Note that Cultural Amnesia gets off to an odd start: in the last paragraph of 'A Note on the Text' James thanks Tom Mayer of Norton for ensuring that: "the process of correcting the corrections did not finish off the author along with the book". Miller and James were in the public eye as young men, middle-aged men, old men. James had a late flowering during his time of slow dying, although Miller’s last years of frailty were silent ones. They remained men of their time, whichever time that was – and of course, they were men. It is hard to imagine a woman being allowed such longevity, or being accepted as both hilarious and serious. Borges' silence in totalitarian Argentina troubles him, while he seems to have little more than contempt for Saramago. Late-twentieth-century feminism put a lot of effort into arguing that a cult of female beauty had been imposed by a consumer society. But presumably a consumer society was not imposing anything on the Greeks when they made Helen's beauty the ignition point for the war that dropped the topless towers of Ilium down in flames."He betrayed his wife by having an eight-year affair with a former model, Leanne Edelsten. When Shaw discovered the affair, in 2012, she threw him out of their Cambridge home, and he moved to a London flat. “I am a reprehensible character,” he told one interviewer. “I deserve everything that has happened to me.” That year he published a further collection of literary essays, Latest Readings (dedicated to “my doctors and nurses at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge”) and found a new berth as a columnist, with Reports of My Death, in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, which ran until 2017. He also released an album with his longtime songwriting partner Pete Atkin, The Colours of the Night, and went on to produce another poetry collection, Injury Time (2017) as well as the epic poem The River in the Sky (2018). This book is largely confined to the 20th century (only about 10 figures date from before that period), and at least two thirds of the persons discussed are related to the major global conflicts of that period (especially the Second World War, and in particular the Holocaust) and the ideologies that caused these conflicts, namely fascism/Nazism and communism. James only talks about the political leaders to a limited extent (although Hitler, Stalin and Mao constantly come looking around the corner); the emphasis is on the intellectuals and artists, especially from literature and much less from music, theatre, visual arts and architecture. Obviously (I’m really sad, I have to use the word ‘obviously’) it is an almost exclusively male company (only 11 female figures have gotten a chapter, though more of them show up within; but some obvious ones, like Virginia Woolf, just remain unmentioned). And the vast majority are European (mainly French and German, very often from Jewish descent). The United States and Latin America are also well cared for, but Asia and Africa in particular are almost completely absent. Thus, this is a thoroughly white book, and because of its high brow content also very elitist (that is not made up for by the few chapters about Tony Curtis, Coco Chanel or Dirk Cavett).

There are clusters of interest, specifically from Vienna's coffee-house culture (Altenberg, Friedell, Polgar) as well as the larger circle of Viennese intellectuals from the first half of the 20th century (Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler, Wittgenstein, Zweig, etc.) and a variety of French intellectuals. I always think of culture in a time of crisis, because culture always is in a time of crisis. There are always things going wrong on a grand scale. They went hugely wrong in the 20th century: in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1933, in Austria in 1938, and so on. But even this sort of ideal-worship comes with its cleverly presented twist, as James (convincingly) makes the case for why Natalie Portman should play Scholl in a film version.Cultural Amnesia is a book of biographical essays by Clive James, first published in 2007. The British title, published by MacMillan, is Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, while the American title, published by W. W. Norton, is Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts. [1] [2] The cover illustration was adapted from a work by the German Modernist designer Peter Behrens. He planned a sixth and last volume of memoirs, “the final chapter of which”, he told one interviewer, “will be dictated while I have an oxygen tent over my head. I wouldn’t like to spare the public my conclusions.” An Indian summer of writing was just beginning, long after the valedictory interviews were done. He wrote a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (2013), a collection of essays, Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014 (2014) and an analysis of the radical change in TV viewing habits, Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook (2016).

With fascinating essays on artists from Louis Armstrong to Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud to Franz Kafka and Beatrix Potter to Marcel Proust, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic. My father and mother were both victims of the Depression, which lasted a long time in Australia. They were out of work for years and the Depression went into the Second World War without a break. the resulting story made Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idea the GI Bill was, into the most effective woman in the history of world culture up until that time, and continues to make her name a radiant touchstone for those who believe, as I do, that the potential liberation of the feminine principle is currently the decisive factor lending an element of constructive hope to the seething tumult within the world’s vast Muslim hegemony, and within the Arab world in particular."And this is odd, because the whole book is dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ingrid Betancourt, and the memory of Sophie Scholl, as much as to say that these women are exemplars of the humanism that the author holds so dear. Indeed, while discussing postwar American education, he writes,