Cultural Amnesia

'A gigantic book on a gigantic theme' - "Sunday Times".

'Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization' - J. M. Coetzee.

Containing more than 100 original essays organized by quotations, James illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the 20th century. 110 photographs.

For non-fiction, there was one stupendous starburst of wild brilliance: Clive James's Cultural Amnesia. It crackles with epigrammatic mischief and reminded me of Charles Dantzig's great Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française, a book that features a devastating skewering of Sartre and a spirited defence of the adjective, plus essays on ignorance, clichés, therapy (against it) digressions (for) and lettres. Will someone please get this fabulous box of tricks translated? -- Simon Schama

'Clive James is one of the most ingeniously stimulating literary critics now writing in English. "Cultural Amnesia", with its encyclopaedic length and organization and the intense jostle of its ideas, is to be dipped into over weeks and months. If the dipper occasionally brings up exasperation, it brings up astonished delight far more often; and, best of all, exasperated astonished delight'- "Boston Globe".