Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems. The book is a series of essays on 106 people James has been fascinated by, most of them from the 20th century. Whether you agree with him or not about Portman, in James’ ardor, poor old guillotined Sophie Scholl gets lost in the Hollywood gush and semi-amateur movie casting.

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. There were several moments where James caught me entirely off-guard with his stealth humor, and many of his essays are very enlightening. Bond tosses it back to her with the admirably curt reply, ‘You forget I got a First in Oriental languages at Cambridge. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Each time this scene is set, he then tells the reader that he really should learn the language of the original work.Heine and Wagner are getting on better than Nietzsche expected: neither has yet strangled the other. We know what he doesn’t: that in the twentieth century the story of Sejanus’s daughter will be repeated several million times. A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career.

Containing over a hundred essays, this is a definitive guide to twentieth century culture, cataloguing and exploring the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers. I find myself starting with those figures I feel I know best (which is never as well as James) and drifting onto the (for me) relatively obscure names. Never a million laughs, he tells her his story about the daughter of Sejanus: a story which the reader will find in this book. not the actual achievement of science, but the language of science, which, clumsily imitated by the proponents of Cultural Studies, has helped to make real culture unapproachable for exactly those students who might otherwise have been most attracted to it, and has simultaneously furthered the emergence and consolidation of an international cargo cult whose witch doctors have nothing in mind beyond their own advancement. To make matters worse, James dedicates the whole book to Scholl, and yet he spills five times more ink on Tony Curtis.You never know where the essay will take you, its path is often idiosyncratic but never less than arresting. Those were the very means by which Montaigne invented the modern essay, and at first I must have had an essay of my own in mind: a long essay, but one with the usual shape, a single line of argument moving through selected perceptions to a neat conclusion. A fabulous effort of style and concentration, a prestidigitator’s trick box packed with epigrammatic summaries of all the creativity in every field of art and science since the Renaissance, a prose epic raised to the level of poetry, Friedell’s magic show of a book remains a fantastic demonstration of the mind at serious play.

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. 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. It might seem a pity to break pieces off their finished work, but I think the integrity of their concentrated effort can only stand revealed more clearly. We take pride in offering a wide selection of used books, from classics to hidden gems, ensuring there is something for every literary palate. in 1938, Friedell saw the storm troopers marching down the street, on their way to the building in which he had his apartment full of books.

In fact, while reading this book, I picked up a copy of The Rebel by Albert Camus, finished it entirely, and also attempted to read War and Peace by Tolstoy. Active from the early years of the twentieth century until the Nazis turned off the lights in Austria, the Viennese prodigy knew everything, or talked as if he did.