Rather, Heine is used as an excuse for James to extrapolate on celebrity, first with an aside on Greta Garbo’s lofty intellectual justifications for ignoring all fan mail, then, ickily, James’ own ruminations on the burden of fame. Persistent hectoring about languages, yet more bragging: Nobody will ever accuse Clive James of wearing his learning lightly. It is a continual concern of the book to demand what moral responsibilities an intellectual should have when faced with totalitarianism.

Two central, connecting threads running throughout his non-fiction are his uncompromising hatred of the abominations that were Hitler and the Holocaust, and the tyranny of Soviet Communism. When young and cocky, I had defined a poem as any piece of writing that could not be quoted from except out of context.To recap, Sophie Scholl’s section goes from 706-714, but on 709 Na A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career. But the adventurous jobs are becoming more predictable all the time, even at the level of celebrity and conspicuous material success. Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism). Yes, sloppiness in language does lead to sloppiness in thought, but intellectuals-with-standards such as James claims to be need to pick their fights more carefully.

If you're one of those people that does find him arrogant, this book will doubtless give you plenty of ammunition to back up the theory.It has always been part of the definition of humanism that true learning has no end in view except its own furtherance.