Which now that I think of it, is pretty much what we watch James doing again and again – intellectual masturbation. Not long after I began marking passages for future consideration, I also began keeping notes in the margin beside the markings, and then longer notes on the endpapers. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it. But even as I stumbled through with the dictionary ever present, I could tell that I was on to something.

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. I think it is fitting, given James's central themes, that his final sketch before his conclusion is one of Stefan Zweig, whose memoir The World of Yesterday I just reviewed. He winds up this curious and, to this American, rather pointless essay, with the outlandish assertion that when Thatcher, in 1982, met with Chinese leaders in Beijing about handing over Hong Kong, she implied to them that if things were not handled properly (from a Western point of view) they could be faced with the possibility of atomic war.Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost. Anna Akhmatova at her most beautiful, a catwalk model with the nose of an unsuccessful pugilist, has moved in on Tony Curtis at his most handsome, dressed for his role as Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. If I could put it into a sentence, I would say that it relies on the conviction that nothing creative should be excluded for the sake of any other conviction. But to really make this work, about a quarter of the essays, the ones which don't bear on this subject, would need to be cut. Possibly the most dramatic book of its type written since Camus’s The Rebel, Cultural Amnesia brings out, better than any formulaic manual of cultural studies, the true binding force of creativity.

There is nothing inherently wrong with erudition: it’s not as if we’re drowning in it, and anyway Proust himself wrote the most erudite book in the whole of French literature.

If the eighteenth century had meant to usher in the age of reason, the nineteenth century, with the cold snick of the guillotine ringing in its ears, meant to supply some of the regrettable deficiencies of reason by the addition of science. But somewhere within the total field of human knowledge, humanism still beckons to us as our best reason for having minds at all.

In it he records, with a dazzling display not just of his hallmark aphoristic, witty and penetrating style, but, more importantly, the incredible range of his reading over a long, productive life of cultural commentary. Clichés, weird bête noires and general sloppiness: James says somewhere he spent 3 years writing this book, and that he considers it if not his magnum opus, at least his summing up.Overture and all the individual essays, may be accessed via the menu column to the left of this page. As I was reading, I felt I was deepening my understanding and appreciation of Western culture, sometimes by taking a new look at a well-known figure, and other times by learning about a previously unknown person whose work I am know seeking out. Alternatively if it's just going to be a random collection of biographies, a different quarter should be cut, namely some of those which do concern totalitarianism.