Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (Paperback)
Clive James (author)- In stock online
`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. The reader will recognize some of their names, while other names will be more obscure. My intellectual betes noires are here too, and the same division might apply.'
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' 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: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9780330481755
Number of pages: 912
Weight: 653 g
Dimensions: 197 x 131 x 42 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
The summa of James's unparalleled career as a cultural critic.
One of the most ingeniously stimulating literary critics now writing in English. -- Richard Eder
A capacious and capricious encyclopedia of essays about everyone he considers worth knowing about in the 20th century. -- Liesl Schillinger
For non-fiction, there was one stupedous starburst of wild brilliance: Clive James's Cultural Amnesia. It crackles with epigrammatic mischief and reminded me of Charles Dantzig's great Dictionnair egoiste de la litterature francaise, a book that features a devastating skewering of Sartre and a spirited defence of the adjective, plus essays on ignorance, cliches, therapy (against it) digressions (for) and lettres. Will someone please get this fabulous box of tricks translated? -- Simon Schama
Clive James
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