Front cover image for Cultural amnesia : necessary memories from history and the arts

Cultural amnesia : necessary memories from history and the arts

Clive James (Author)
Echoing Edward Said's belief that "Western humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism," renowned critic Clive James presents here his life's work. Containing over one hundred original essays, organized by quotations from A to Z, this book illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. In discussing, among others, Louis Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, James writes, "If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive." This is the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.--From publisher description
Print Book, English, 2007
First edition View all formats and editions
W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2007
Biography
xxxii, 876 pages : portraits ; 25 cm
9780393061161, 9780393333541, 0393061167, 039333354X
76183163
Overture : Vienna
Anna Akhmatova
Peter Altenberg
Louis Armstrong
Raymond Aron
Walter Benjamin
Marc Bloch
Jorge Luis Borges
Robert Brasillach
Sir Thomas Browne
Albert Camus
Dick Cavett
Paul Celan
Chamfort
Coco Chanel
Charles Chaplin
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
G.K. Chesterton
Jean Cocteau
Gianfranco Contini
Benedetto Croce
Tony Curtis
Ernst Robert Curtius
Miles Davis
Sergei Diaghilev
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
Alfred Einstein
Duke Ellington
Federico Fellini
W.C. Fields
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
Sigmund Freud
Egon Friedell
François Furet
Charles de Gaulle
Edward Gibbon
Terry Gilliam
Josef Goebbels
Witold Gombrowicz
William Hazlitt
Hegel
Heinrich Heine
Adolf Hitler
Ricarda Huch
Ernst Jünger
Franz Kafka
John Keats
Leszek Kolakowski
Alexandra Kollontai
Heda Margolius Kovaly
Karl Kraus
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Norman Mailer
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Golo Mann
Heinrich Mann
Michael Mann
Thomas Mann
Mao Zedong
Chris Marker
John McCloy
Zinka Milanov
Czeslaw Milosz
Eugenio Montale
Montesquieu
Alan Moorehead
Paul Muratov
Lewis Namier
Grigory Ordzhonokidze
Octavio Paz
Alfred Polgar
Beatrix Potter
Jean Prévost
Marcel Proust
Edgar Quinet
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Jean-François Revel
Richard Rhodes
Rainer Maria Rilke
Virginio Rognoni
Ernesto Sabato
Edward Said
Sainte-Beuve
José Saramago
Jean-Paul Sartre
Erik Satie
Arthur Schnitzler
Sophie Scholl
Wolf Jobst Siedler
Manès Sperber
Tacitus
Margaret Thatcher
Henning von Tresckow
Leon Trotsky
Karl Tschuppik
Dubravka Ugresic
Miguel de Unamuno
Pedro Henriquez Ureña
Paul Valéry
Mario Vargas Llosa
Evelyn Waugh
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Isoroku Yamamoto
Aleksandr Zinoviev
Carl Zuckmayer
Stefan Zweig
Coda : Kun-Han-Su : Eckstein and the Egyptian Kinghopper
Includes index