Lezard, Nicholas (10 July 2010). "The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008 by Clive James". The Guardian . Retrieved 29 November 2019. James had strange views about women ( Cultural Amnesia performs its own act of selective forgetting, including only a handful of women in its 100 entries) and cranky ones about climate change. But the public largely forgave him, while Germaine Greer – who arrived in the UK at about the same time as James and who changed the world and how we live in it more profoundly than he or Miller – has not been treated so tolerantly. Women are not so easily excused when they behave foolishly or make mistakes; usually, they are not excused at all. It turns out not to be quite that: many of the pieces are brief summings-up of these people's lives, but James presents each first with a brief biographical sketch, then a quote attributed to the person in question -- and then a longer bit that generally takes the quote as its starting point. James certainly endorses some very worthwhile books (and does so with quite convincing enthusiasm). Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization' – J. M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace

Clive James's massive new book, "Cultural Amnesia," is, in essence, a very fat commonplace book, though its author has somewhat more grandiose ambitions in mind: "I wanted to write," he says, "about philosophy, history, politics and the arts all at once, and about what had happened to those things during the course of the multiple catastrophes into whose second principal outburst (World War I was the first) I had been born in 1939, and which continued to shake the world as I grew to adulthood." Although a long book, Cultural Amnesia is not substantial. Don’t expect it to be instructive. (...) James sits on the judge’s bench assessing each author for their views. This is no mere collection of bits; it is a book with a theme, namely how the Kingdom of Letters did or did not stand up to the murderous philistinism of the dictators, especially Hitler and Stalin." - A.N.Wilson, Sunday Times

One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance' – Simon Schama, historian and author of The Power of Art He has a gift for noticing and highlighting the telling phrase. (...) One of James's charms as a critic is that he genuinely seems to enjoy praising people. (...) If you open Cultural Amnesia in the hope of getting a bluffer's guide to the intellectuals, you will be disappointed; but if you read it as an account of how an educator has himself been self-educated, you will be rewarded well enough." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly James, Clive (1975). The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media: A Moral Poem. Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-01185-3. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010. [54] He was an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge (his alma mater). In the 2015 BAFTAs, James received a special award honouring his 50-year career. [55] In 2014, he was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy. [56] Cultural Amnesia is a book of biographical essays by Clive James, first published in 2007. The British title, published by MacMillan, is Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, while the American title, published by W. W. Norton, is Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts. [1] [2] The cover illustration was adapted from a work by the German Modernist designer Peter Behrens.

Organised alphabetically by surname, this almanac invites you to share in the connections James draws, and to make your own – whether you read cover-to-cover, or allow curiosity to guide you. 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, public memoir and personal record – and provides a field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now. There are some great quotes and quite a few good anecdotes, but it's no surprise that James seems to revel particularly in writers who didn't necessarily collect their thoughts in the neatest way. In 2013, he issued his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. The work, adopting quatrains to translate the original's terza rima, was well received by Australian critics. [27] [28] Writing for The New York Times, Joseph Luzzi thought it often failed to capture the more dramatic moments of the Inferno, but that it was more successful where Dante slows down, in the more theological and deliberative cantos of the Purgatorio and Paradiso. [29] Novelist and memoirist [ edit ] In fact, these are often the most fun, because of the connexions he makes -- though he makes connexions everywhere else as well. Star's secret affair". ninemsn: A Current Affair. 23 April 2012. Archived from the original on 24 June 2012 . Retrieved 26 June 2012.

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Andrew Collins on working with Clive James: "to collaborate with him was like winning a competition" ". Radio Times . Retrieved 28 November 2019. Reviewing the book for The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens argued that James tries "to glamorize the uninspiring - tries to show how tough and shapely were the common sense formulations of Raymond Aron for example, when set against the seductive, panoptic bloviations of Jean Paul Sartre" and that he "succeeds in it by trying to comb out all centrist clichés and by caring almost as much about language as it is possible to do." Additionally, Hitchens noted that "a unifying principle of the collection is its feminism" and that "one of James's charms as a critic is that he genuinely seems to enjoy praising people." [3] Contents [ edit ] Latin America figures prominently -- Borges, Paz, Sabato, Vargas Llosa -- as does the Soviet-dominated East. Lccn 2006036398 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 (Extended OCR) Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary OL7452101M Openlibrary_edition a b Jeffries, Stuart (27 November 2019). "Clive James obituary". Guardian . Retrieved 28 November 2019.

In 1995 he set up Watchmaker Productions to produce The Clive James Show for ITV, and a subsequent series launched the British career of singer and comedian Margarita Pracatan. James hosted one of the early chat shows on Channel 4 and fronted the BBC's Review of the Year programmes in the late 1980s ( Clive James on the '80s) and 1990s ( Clive James on the '90s), which formed part of the channel's New Year's Eve celebrations. [34] a b Decca Aitkenhead "Clive James: 'I would have been an obvious first choice for cocaine death. I could use up a lifetime's supply of anything in two weeks'", The Guardian, 25 May 2009. This urge to inflate the accomplishments of minor figures carries over into James’s appreciations of his worthier subjects, who are often characterized in language that reminds readers that “hype” is the short form of “hyperbole.” It is not enough to praise Evelyn Waugh’s literary excellence; James insists that he is “the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century.” Unsatisfied with merely celebrating Louis Armstrong’s wonderful musicianship, James describes him as someone who did “as much as anyone since Lincoln to change the history of the United States.” An appreciation of John Keats, similarly, opines, “Every modern poet is obliged to have a view on Keats.” After a while, readers assailed by these all-too-frequent rhetorical excesses will likely feel the need to pose some sharply unrhetorical questions of their own: Has James read every writer of twentieth century English prose, studied all post-Lincoln Americans, and surveyed all modern poets regarding their supposed need to formulate an attitude about Keats? This passion to exalt what is very good or excellent into the status of the ideal or perfect is a serious flaw in James’s treatment of many of his subjects, not least because he usually fails to provide either evidence or argument for the validity of these assertions.

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That year he published a further collection of literary essays, Latest Readings (dedicated to “my doctors and nurses at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge”) and found a new berth as a columnist, with Reports of My Death, in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, which ran until 2017. He also released an album with his longtime songwriting partner Pete Atkin, The Colours of the Night, and went on to produce another poetry collection, Injury Time (2017) as well as the epic poem The River in the Sky (2018). James was able to read, with varying fluency, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. [74] A tango enthusiast, he travelled to Buenos Aires for dance lessons and had a dance floor in his house. [64]