Dimensions
154 x 233 x 45mm
The story of a hundred years as told by Clive James
"In this book can be heard the merest edge of an enormous conversation. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room, wearing name tags in case they don't recognise each other (although some recognise each other all too well, and avoid contact). My heroes and heroines are here. The reader will recognise some of their names, while other names will be more obscure. My intellectual betes noires are here too, and the same division might apply."
An almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what, Cultural Amnesia is Clive's unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the 20th-century. From Charles de Gaulle to Thomas Mann, from Hitler to Wittgenstein, from Argentina to Australia, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record – and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
