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. But beyond his skills as a linguist, James’ pride in his learning is tiresome elsewhere. Throughout the book we get autobiographical glimpses of an intellect in the making. Here he is reading Paul Valery’s Introduction a la poetique: In fact, these are often the most fun, because of the connexions he makes -- though he makes connexions everywhere else as well. strikes me as meaningless: what does he mean by an inimical “language of science”? Who are the “proponents of Cultural Studies”, and how do they “clumsily imitate” this mysterious language? What does it mean to put the humanities to “careerist use”? Is this some kind of debate within academe that we are being subjected to? If we seek reassurance about human dignity instead of mere acceptance of human weakness, we must face up to [late 19th/first-half 20th Century German humanist writer Ricarda Huch], and try to remember why Judas found it so hard to look into the face of Christ--not because the divine serenity that was there, because of the self-seeking calculation that was not."

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James | Waterstones

It's frustrating, because there are threads running through all of this, several at a time -- but it's not tied together well enough to truly make for an argument (or several). There are clusters of interest, specifically from Vienna's coffee-house culture (Altenberg, Friedell, Polgar) as well as the larger circle of Viennese intellectuals from the first half of the 20th century (Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler, Wittgenstein, Zweig, etc.) and a variety of French intellectuals.

Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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.” The ever-recurring mantra of James, which is underlined especially in his final chapter, is his unwavering belief in liberal democracy, in humanism and freedom. And there is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with that; it indicates that James really does have valuable things to tell, and it is his right to do so. But for our author, that belief is also an absolute criterion for morally weighing the many persons and currents mentioned. The heroes of James' story are those figures who contributed to those three phenomena (liberal democracy, humanism and freedom). He is utterly positive about intellectuals such as Raymond Aron, Benedetto Croce, François Furet, Wittold Gombrowicz, Leszek Kolakowski, Jean-François Revel, Ernesto Sabato, and Stefan Zweig, who - often against their surroundings - have openly opposed despotism, authoritarianism and all ideologies related to it.

Clive James Books | Waterstones Clive James Books | Waterstones

And in the end, the names themselves are just jumping-off points for James to write essays, often brilliant ones, about the intellectual concerns thrown up by the last century. The essays taken as themselves are wonderfully stimulating, not only fascinating in their subject matter but also a sheer joy to read because of the quality of his writing. As a prose stylist I can't think of anyone to touch him. He admires efficiency of expression in others, and this has made him one of the most aphoristic, quotable writers: Several philosophers appear but their remit is so illogical as to the reference point that their ideologies disappear in a smog of erudite speciosity. But it gets worse. 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. Whether you agree with him or not about Portman, in James’ ardor, poor old guillotined Sophie Scholl gets lost in the Hollywood gush and semi-amateur movie casting. To make matters worse, James dedicates the whole book to Scholl, and yet he spills five times more ink on Tony Curtis.in the West, someone obsessed with material things is correctly thought to be a fool. In the East [meaning pre-1991 Eastern Europe and USSR], everyone was obsessed with material things." Boston Globe [A] fabulously gifted, enviably well-read, generously inclusive, and always commonsensical writer Occasionally he turns his irony on himself in "On the Limits of Self-Improvement," a-three-part piece in which he dispatches himself to a spa in the effort to improve his less than perfect physical being. The verdict overall on the treatment? "[S]ome of this you can try at home and some of it you certainly should." Quoting Joseph Goebbels,January 25, 1944: "Since Stalingrad, even the smallest military success has been denied us. On the other hand, our political chances have hugely increased, as you know."

Cultural Amnesia – Necessary Memories from History and the

It is an interesting and appealingly mixed assemblage (it's hard not to approve when he even throws Dubravka Ugresic into the mix), and there are good points made by these examples. For a more detailed critique of the Introduction: James tells us that throughout his reading and writing career, he made “annotations” which seemed to be beyond a narrow subject, belonging to a “scheme” which could perhaps be approached far in the future, perhaps near the end of his life. He talks of the threads of this larger scheme as “clarities variously illuminating a dark sea of unrelenting turbulence … Far from a single argument, there would be scores of arguments. I wanted to write about philosophy, history, politics and the arts all at once, and about what had happened to those things during the course of the multiple catastrophes into whose second principal outburst (World War I was the first) I had been born in 1939, and which continued to shake the world as I grew to adulthood.” From the French viewpoint, liberalism had been able to do so little in staving off the kind of Nazi brand of totalitarianism, it was thought that only another brand of absolute power--the Soviet Union--could fill the vacuum."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? John Banville, author of The Sea, New York Review of Books One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance NOTE: Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power. 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. Conspicuously absent: Scandinavia, Africa (Camus is about as far he ventures), and most of Asia (Mao, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and Isoroku Yamamoto are pretty much the extent of it).

Cultural Amnesia - Pan Macmillan AU Cultural Amnesia - Pan Macmillan AU

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. 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. Clive James with his book Cultural Amnesia, 2007, a collection of biographical essays. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters So what is this dreaded field ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural... )? It was initiated by “British academics in the late 1950s, 60s and 70s”This could be viewed by a reader as a cop-out. As an admission that the task was beyond his capability to execute it. After having read 20% of the book I view this plan as precisely a cop-out. James isn’t capable of constructing a long well-reasoned narrative. He’s strictly an essay man, and his essays contain very little “evidence” for his assertions. At best, they’re little more than personal views, uttered as if they’re revealed wisdom, for the humble “student” to take on faith. Clearly James has only chosen subjects that had an impact on him -- there isn't a single piece in the book that reads as if it was written out of an obligation to relevance. That's a plus, as it makes every selection seem vibrant. (...) One of the things that distinguishes Cultural Amnesia from the finger-pointing, eat-your-bean-sprouts tomes about canons and multiculturalism is that James doesn't make you feel guilty, he makes you feel hungry." - Allen Barra, Salon