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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, James illuminates, rescues, or occasionally demolishes the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century.

This arbitrary arrangement, which looks on the surface to be so rigorously thought-out, vexes the reader and leads to a feeling that despite certain claims to a unifying cultural vision, there is rather ad hoc approach to the project.There could only be a linear cluster of nodal points, working the way the mind—or at any rate my mind, such as it is—works as it moves through time: a trail of clarities variously illuminating a dark sea of unrelenting turbulence, like the phosphorescent wake of a phantom ship. But really, I am not so sure James should have taken a more holistic approach to his belief in knowing other languages – when I read T. What this book then proposes—what it embodies, I hope—is something difficult enough to be satisfactory for an age in which to be presented with nothing except reassurance is ceasing to be tolerable.

It's this approach which has led to James's much commented-on demonization of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is ‘a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil’, ‘the most conspicuous example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization’. This is linguistic pecksniffian stuff you used to find in the back of The Atlantic Monthly where people reported quarrelling bitterly with their spouses over the use of “hopefully. Still, although there are a lot of fascinating characters in the book, the overwhelming presence is of Clive James himself, and I don't believe he ever had any other intention. While the women ‘can earn millions for spending a couple of hours a day wrapping themselves around an oaf’. Heine and Wagner are getting on better than Nietzsche expected: neither has yet strangled the other.James's writings include the great tome Cultural Amnesia , the reading of which is something like getting a master's degree in 20th-century intellectual history. It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. One of the great beauties of the seventeenth-century Spanish world, Juana Inés is a ringer for Isabella Rossellini.

But aside from one 8 word quote from “Requiem”, James’ narrative about her focuses on (1) her heroic stand against the tyranny of the state, and (2) “the beautiful incarnation of pre-revolutionary Petersburg” and “she was a femme fatale” and “love for her broken-nosed beauty was a common condition among the male poets”. as a riposte to a young woman who complained “that his interest in her was based only (nur) on sexual attraction”.The theme which looms largest is the way in which the twentieth century can be characterised as a clash between two forms of totalitarianism, left and right. He says that, if he has done his work in assembling this volume properly, “themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible. I CAN’T IMAGINE being brave enough to copy the way Egon Friedell made an exit, but there was something about the way he made an entrance that could be a model for us all. Witty, insightful and unashamedly erudite, the book is a superb miscellany of 20th-century cultural and political subjects. a towering figure like Brecht “had given aid and comfort to totalitarian power”) Science comes under attack, despite the common notion that “humanism” implies a reliance on scientific method and is most generally felt to be allied with it.