The thing I marvel at is that I've lived so long, and if I died today, I would have had a long life. I don't take that for granted at all. I was brought up at a time when children were disappearing by the million, the Nazis killed one and a half million children and any of them could have been me. I've always lived my life as if today was a gift and tomorrow might not come.

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. 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." This book is largely confined to the 20th century (only about 10 figures date from before that period), and at least two thirds of the persons discussed are related to the major global conflicts of that period (especially the Second World War, and in particular the Holocaust) and the ideologies that caused these conflicts, namely fascism/Nazism and communism. James only talks about the political leaders to a limited extent (although Hitler, Stalin and Mao constantly come looking around the corner); the emphasis is on the intellectuals and artists, especially from literature and much less from music, theatre, visual arts and architecture. Obviously (I’m really sad, I have to use the word ‘obviously’) it is an almost exclusively male company (only 11 female figures have gotten a chapter, though more of them show up within; but some obvious ones, like Virginia Woolf, just remain unmentioned). And the vast majority are European (mainly French and German, very often from Jewish descent). The United States and Latin America are also well cared for, but Asia and Africa in particular are almost completely absent. Thus, this is a thoroughly white book, and because of its high brow content also very elitist (that is not made up for by the few chapters about Tony Curtis, Coco Chanel or Dirk Cavett). 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). James offers an interesting mix of good and bad guys, and it makes for a good overview of all that went wrong in the 20th century, especially from the intellectual angle.But (Sperber) doesn’t say enough about the Social Democrats. There were always more people voting Social Democrat than voting Communist, right to the end. Why did not the Social Democrats see the Party as the only hope? Sperber doesn’t tell us. Once can only conclude that even while he was writing his monumental autobiography, at the end of his life, he still clung to the belief that the people who fell for neither of the political extremes weren’t fully serious about politics. Such is the long-term effect of an ideological burden: when you finally put it down, you save your pride by attributing the real naivety (sic? Is this a British variation of naiveté?) to those who never took it up.” (p. 726)

The class clown is the one who has no other means to defend himself. It wasn't necessarily a good thing, but it's the position that someone like me is usually forced into. I found when the other young men were chasing me in the playground, the best way to take the steam out of the situation is to sit down, organize a discussion group and tell stories.Some made great claims for his literary talents. Writing under the headline As Good as Heaney in 2009, Julian Gough in Prospect magazine championed two volumes of James’s collected verse. But how could one take seriously a TV critic who wrote satirical verse epics such as The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media: A Moral Poem (1975) or Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World (1976), still less compare them to the Nobel laureate’s? Miller once called himself an “informaliser”; he brought jukeboxes into opera productions and Wittgenstein into standup comedy. He turned his fierce, pliant, democratic intelligence on all manner of subjects: imitating a sat-upon sofa, directing Alice in Wonderland, talking about Shakespeare to schoolchildren, arguing with Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to his door.

He got through all that. Then in the end, the camp was liberated. They were sent home on a flight of B-24 Liberators so they wouldn't have to wait for a ship. One of the Liberators got caught in a typhoon over Taiwan and crashed with all aboard. My father was one of them. Most of the figures are from the 20th century, with a stray ancient (Tacitus) and a few figures from more recent times (from Montesqieu to Hegel to Chamfort). With fascinating essays on artists from Louis Armstrong to Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud to Franz Kafka and Beatrix Potter to Marcel Proust, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic. 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:

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But James can be quite good sometimes (which is why the sloppy, dashed-off parts are particularly disappointing). In a lucid, mostly on-topic discussion of political deep thinking guy Manes Sperber (no, I never heard of him either), James talks about those ideologues who come to see the errors of their ways, but never, it seems, completely so: 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? 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.” The1940-1941 band was [Duke] Ellington's apotheosis, and as a consequence maintained the materials of its own destruction, because all those star soloists wanted bands of their own. . . The new boys had to go somewhere. Ellington was too generous not to realize that one of the reasons they went was because of him, so he was careful not to criticize them too hard. He made a joke of it: it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. But the joke was true, bad by extension for all arts." When I’d given up on the book, I decided to read the essays about women that I hadn’t yet. Here they are.