There are some great quotes and quite a few good anecdotes, but it's no surprise that James seems to revel particularly in writers who didn't necessarily collect their thoughts in the neatest way. Vivian James was spared further feminisation when Gone With the Wind was released. “After Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O’Hara, the name became irrevocably a girl’s name no matter how you spelled it,” he wrote, so his mother let him become Clive after a character in a Tyrone Power movie. Gough argued: “James is an absolute master of surface, and the great critic of surfaces, not because he is superficial but because he believes that the distortions on the surface tell you what’s underneath. Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth. With the essays and the poems – which I think you have to consider as one great project – he’s built an immense, protective barrier reef around western civilisation.”

Clive James Books | Waterstones Clive James Books | Waterstones

In attempting to do this anthology justice, I am running the risk of making it sound more eclectic than it really is. If James could have been born in another time and place, he would have chosen Mitteleuropa in the first third of the 20th century—that drowned world and lost Bohemia of Jewish savants and painters and café-philosophers. It is men like Peter Altenberg and Karl Kraus whom he envies, while of course never ceasing to wonder (as we all must) how he himself would have shaped up when the Nazis came. Another of his gold standards is the Russian and French literary opposition, leavened with a good sprinkling of those—like Robert Brasillach—whose talents led them to identify with the overdogs.A major theme of the book is: doing the right thing, and James is pretty hard on several authors who he feels didn't. He betrayed his wife by having an eight-year affair with a former model, Leanne Edelsten. When Shaw discovered the affair, in 2012, she threw him out of their Cambridge home, and he moved to a London flat. “I am a reprehensible character,” he told one interviewer. “I deserve everything that has happened to me.” Seems like a somewhat up-scale Altenberg. “In the rich tradition of French aphorists” he committed suicide when faced with the guillotine in 1794. James says he “forecast the modern age by the reason for his death”. In this clumsy phrase he implies that those victims of the Terror who did not commit suicide but faced the blade did somehow not “forecast the modern age”, one would suppose. It is a continual concern of the book to demand what moral responsibilities an intellectual should have when faced with totalitarianism. It's this approach which has led to James's much commented-on demonization of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is ‘a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil’, ‘the most conspicuous example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization’. Watching him lay into someone like this is great fun, not least because it gives you a few ideas of what to say to the next Sartre-nut who corners you at a party. Sometimes he seems to hold these people up to some very demanding standards: he's convincing on Sartre's feeble response to Nazism, but surely it's a bit much to question why Wittgenstein never mention the Fascists in Philosophische Untersuchungen, a work of pure linguistic philosophy?

sneer from the late Christopher Hitchens Some holiday sneer from the late Christopher Hitchens

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-12-19 18:04:17 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA1343704 Boxid_2 CH120820 City New York, NY [u.a.] Donor James’s philosophy of criticism is marvelously summarized in his intention about the book, which is to demonstrate the truth of his belief that our literary inheritance “is our real and inextinguishable fortune.” This inheritance is something which can be ignored from time to time, or only partially appreciated, but it cannot be lost as long as it is talked about. 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. Clive James with his book Cultural Amnesia, 2007, a collection of biographical essays. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters Cultural Amnesia is a book of biographical essays by Clive James, first published in 2007. The British title, published by MacMillan, is Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, while the American title, published by W. W. Norton, is Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts. [1] [2] The cover illustration was adapted from a work by the German Modernist designer Peter Behrens.It would help if the world's large supply of anti-American commentators could decide on which America we are supposed to be in thrall to: the Machiavellian America that can manipulate any country's destiny, or the naïve America that can't find it on the map. While we're waiting for the decision, it might help if we could realize the magnitude of the fix that America got us out of in 1945, and ask ourselves why we expect a people rich and confident enough to do that to be sensitive as well. Power is bound to sound naïve, because it doesn't spot the bitter nuances of feeling helpless. Wow,. RIP Clive, one of our great devotees to the arts and culture. A tour guide to the intellectual pathways that lie behind us, this is his epic collection of essays on individual people that he deems worth remembering. Over the course of many, many essays, the format is about the same: it's a cultural figure (mainly from the 1900s, but with some extreme exceptions), there's a little biographical sketch, and then Uncle Clive tells you a story. A great deal of the time, this story has something to do with what seems to be the loose theme of the book--how intellectuals reacted to (or failed to react to) the dual threats of Nazism and Stalinism, which destroyed a certain beautiful strain of humanism best exemplified by turn-of-the-century Vienna, and how we should not believe we are beyond such evil now. This book should come with a warning label on it. If you are anything like me, reading it will make your to-read shelf grow tremendously. There were several moments where James caught me entirely off-guard with his stealth humor, and many of his essays are very enlightening. I loved his essay on Duke Ellington, for instance, because I've danced to his music for years and knew only a small amount of the peripheral knowledge of the time that James has to offer.

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James - Pan Macmillan

Anyone who fears that Cultural Amnesia is a staid, boring encyclopedic volume need worry no longer. James clearly loves learning and sharing his knowledge. He often talks about his experiences teaching himself to read a host of languages, including Spanish, German, and Russian by having a dictionary in one hand and one of the classics he discusses in his essays in the other. He clearly wants us all to join him in what he says is the best way to learn a new language. He was appointed CBE in 2012 and AO in 2013. In 2008 he was awarded a George Orwell special prize for writing and broadcasting, and in 2015 he received a special award from Bafta for his contribution to television.

I read this book a few months ago but cannot stop thinking about it -- the very antithesis of Cultural Amnesia.

Clive James obituary | Clive James | The Guardian Clive James obituary | Clive James | The Guardian

James is currently diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema. A number of articles published in Australian papers earlier in March 2013 featured interviews with his daughters and some examples of his recent poetry. A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is the book Clive James has always wanted to write. Organized from A through Z, and containing over 100 essays, it's the ultimate guide to the twentieth century, illuminating the careers of many of its thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers. From Luis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, it's a book for our times - and, indeed, for all time. (inner flap) An original haiku to commemorate my inability to complete this irritating tome. I had earnestly embarked on the promised 'crash course in civilization' as advised by J.M.Coetzee, or as 'Notes in the margin of my time' as my second edition offers, not 'Necessary Memories....' together with the same lightbulb picture. For those for whom the majority or all are more or less familiar it's harder to see quite as much to it, and while the individual pieces are almost all worthwhile the sum doesn't add up quite as convincingly.And some of these even a literate English speaker should have caught -- like the claim that: "In the original German, The Tin Drum is Der Blechtrommel" (81), when, of course, it is Die Blechtrommel.