Description

In this book can be heard the merest edge of an enormous conversation. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room, wearing name tags in case they don’t recognize each other (although some recognize each other all too well, and avoid contact). My heroes and heroines are here.

An almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James’s unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the twentieth-century. 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, both public memoir and personal record – and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.

Publisher Review

An eclectic journey through the 20th century, as Clive James explores the careers of luminaries such as Charles de Gaulle and Charlie Chaplin. * Daily Express * Over the past forty years James has been scribbling notes in the margins of the books he has read . . . and this is the result. Clever, contentious and funny. * Guardian * Witty, insightful and unashamedly erudite, the book is a superb miscellany of 20th-century cultural and political subjects. * The Sunday Times * This is a beautiful book. James proves himself not only to be in possession of a towering intellect, but a singular ability to communicate his passions. * Observer * Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization. -- J. M. Coetzee One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance. -- Simon Schama [A] fabulously gifted, enviably well-read, generously inclusive, and always commonsensical writer -- John Banville * New York Review of Books *