It's a pity that he seems to have felt it was inappropriate, because when it does emerge, in his lighter moments, the sentences can really come alive.

The full facts about Nazi Germany came out quite quickly, and were more than enough to induce despair. bogged into the theme mentioned above over and over, but I at least began having questions about the relation between culture, ideology, science – and whether many of the issues James brought up are not, nowadays, major downsides of his beloved American hegemony.On examination, none of these exalted activities was a sure antidote in itself to the poison of irrationality, which is inseparable from human affairs, but fatal to them if granted a life of its own. Discover the joy of reading with us, your trusted source for affordable books that do not compromise on quality. Zweig was one of the foremost proponents of the liberal humanism, the internationalism, the commitment to freedom through culture, that James strongly advocates. Too often used for ill, it is now asked about its use for good, and usually on the assumption that any goodwill be measurable on a market, like a commodity. A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career.

But if you're interested in learning something of what he's picked up from a lifetime's reading – not least about the art of writing a brilliant sentence – then Cultural Amnesia is a whole rich continent waiting to be explored. Thinking otherwise, we doom ourselves to spinning fantasies, which might well be fluent, but could equally be lethal. I guess for James, the horrible wars of the twentieth century were mainly a result of scientific knowledge. We are all doomed to be actors, in the sense that our abilities and deficiencies will guide us, in certain ways if not in others, to becoming active participants in a productive society, whether we like that society or not.The reader will recognize some of their names: Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka. And in quoting them he shows why they should be remembered and why cultural amnesia is a continuing danger. But somewhere within the total field of human knowledge, humanism still beckons to us as our best reason for having minds at all. Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism.