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Cultural Amnesia

Notes in the Margin of My Time

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Cultural Amnesia

Written by: Clive James
Narrated by: Clive James
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About this listen

Abridged for audio. Read by the author, Clive James.

With fascinating essays on towering figures from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic.

'One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance' – Simon Schama, historian and author of The Power of Art

A comprehensive survey of modern culture, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James' unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the twentieth-century. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, 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.

'Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization' – J. M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace

©2008 Clive James; (P)2008 Macmillan Digital Audio 20th Century Art Linguistics Modern Politics & Government Social Sciences United States World

Critic Reviews

One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance (Simon Schama, author of The Power of Art)
Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization (J. M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace)
Over the past forty years James has been scribbling notes in the margins of the books he has read . . . and this is the result. Clever, contentious and funny
Witty, insightful and unashamedly erudite, the book is a superb miscellany of 20th-century cultural and political subjects
This is a beautiful book. James proves himself not only to be in possession of a towering intellect, but a singular ability to communicate his passions
An eclectic journey through the 20th century, as Clive James explores the careers of luminaries such as Charles de Gaulle and Charlie Chaplin
[A] fabulously gifted, enviably well-read, generously inclusive, and always commonsensical writer (John Banville, author of The Sea)
Clive James is one of the most ingeniously stimulating literary critics. Cultural Amnesia, with its encyclopedic length and organization and the intense jostle of its ideas, is to be dipped into over weeks and months. If the dipper occasionally brings up exasperation, it brings up astonished delight far more often; and, best of all, exasperated astonished delight
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