Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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Then a bone tossed: “This is a book about a world that men made, and it taught plenty of us to wish that women had made it instead. The times are not long gone when nobody could aspire to that—not even Egon Friedell, a man once famous for being better informed than anybody in Vienna.

Because, as a journalist and television presenter, I travelled professionally for more than twenty years on end, the café was in many different cities: Sydney, London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Florence, Rome, Venice, Paris, Biarritz, Cannes, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Moscow, Madrid, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Bombay, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo, Jerusalem, Valletta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Miami, Mexico City, Havana, Rio, Buenos Aires, Auckland, Wellington, Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney again.

But even as I stumbled through with the dictionary ever present, I could tell that I was on to something.

And I take it that this is what he wants us to do with the contents of Cultural Amnesia - talk exuberantly about the wealth which is there for the taking. He doesn’t define exactly what he means by humanism, hence I must assume he means the most common definition. Despite the brevity of our contact, given the range of figures he has included in this book, I’m a bit surprised that I didn’t make it into one of his vignettes. An intellectually informative and exhilarating book that surely records the best that James wrote, in a body of work remarkable for its range and depth. English is this new world’s lingua franca, not because it was once spoken in the British Empire but because it is spoken now in the American international cultural hegemony.James is a genius - a master of both the low-brow AND the high-brow - and a man who understands what true freedom is. The section on Sophie Scholl (the German college student who was executed for protesting the Nazi regime) was somewhat more on topic, but took a far stranger turn when James embarked on speculating who should play Scholl in the talkies, speculation that then took him on a long dewy-eyed bout of incontinent praise directed towards actress Natalie Portman. We take pride in offering a wide selection of used books, from classics to hidden gems, ensuring there is something for every literary palate. a towering figure like Brecht “had given aid and comfort to totalitarian power”) Science comes under attack, despite the common notion that “humanism” implies a reliance on scientific method and is most generally felt to be allied with it.

As the time for assembling my reflections approached, I resolved that a premature synthesis was the thing to be avoided.Of course these moments are rendered in the usual 21st century aw-shucks self-deprecatory way, but this doesn’t really fool anybody anymore, does it?

In April 2007, Cultural Amnesia was published in the USA, and since May 2007 it has been available in the UK, Australia and the Republic of Ireland. If I could put it into a sentence, I would say that it relies on the conviction that nothing creative should be excluded for the sake of any other conviction.The British title, published by MacMillan, is Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, while the American title, published by W.