Ebook: Cultural amnesia: necessary memories from history and the arts

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.;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.