We Clive James fans savour not only the wit, warmth and polymathy of our hero but also his own vivid awareness of these qualities. “Year after year in the late 1980s and early 1990s – the years when the East was coming back from the dead – I would stop at the Polish bookshop on Boulevard St Germain to see if there was a new volume of Gombrowicz . . . The complete Gombrowicz journals are still not available in English . . . Gombrowicz would have liked the idea of an Australian resident in London looking forward to a trip to Paris so that he could buy the latest book of a Pole resident in Buenos Aires.”

This gives especial pleasure to those of us who have never heard of Witold Gombrowicz, and who wonder slightly whether James has invented him in order to pull our leg.

Cultural Amnesia consists of a little over 100 essays on figures as various as Duke Ellington and Hitler, Jean Cocteau and Margaret Thatcher. It is getting on for 1,000 pages long, and it reflects a lifetime’s intelligent reading. James is constantly edging forward to show off the rare editions he has bought, the exotic places he has visited and the grand company he has kept. “When filming in Rome, I had a jacket made by the celebrated tailor Littrico, and found out that I had the same measurements as Gorbachev; they were on file in Littrico’s office.” Archivists will be grateful to know that there is a letter from Philip Larkin to James “now in the State Library of New South Wales”.

Although a long book, Cultural Amnesia is not substantial. Don’t expect it to be instructive. At the start of each entry he gives the shortest of thumbnail sketches and then settles down to a – usually pretty brief – analysis of the person. James’s dream place seems to be preNazi Vienna where a cafe table is filled with the likes of Hermann Broch, Alfred Polgar, Peter Altenberg or Robert Musil, all enjoying the badinage and cultural high talk of Egon Friedell. This book tries to reproduce some of that feeling of the heady combination of high culture and cafe wit, and at its best it succeeds; but sometimes, the treatment is too light. The chapter on Hegel, for example, consists of little more than a ramble around Hegel’s best line in the dictionary of quotations – “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only in the gathering darkness.” But anyone who had no idea what Hegel wrote or stood for would not be any the wiser after reading James. Ditto the chapter on Proust, which really says nothing about Proust’s zest for creating characters; he prefers Proust when generalising.

For throughout this book, 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. An essay that is especially puzzling is about the great German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius. “It is comprehensible and forgivable that Curtius said nothing about Nazi atrocities during the war. Incomprehensible and unforgivable is that he said nothing about them after it.” Who, in these sentences, is doing the comprehending or the forgiving? Curtius wrote a great book, as James begins by stating – European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages. But, as with the other entries, James does not really get round to telling you what is in the book. His essay is one of attitude.

James spends much time in this book wielding his sledgehammer to crack a Nazi nut. Curtius wrote his book to retrieve from the postwar rubble the great European mainstream of civilised literature from the late Middle Ages to the time of Diderot. In a way, Curtius’s book does in prose what Ezra Pound did in poetry in the Pisan Cantos, a work about which James is cheaply unfair. (Pound made appalling fascist broadcasts, but it would be as unjust to judge his poetry in their lurid light, as it would be to judge James the intellectual by the cheeky-chappy TV broadcasts he made 20 years ago.)

There is something toe-curling in James’s dedication of the book to Sophie Scholl, the 22-year-old Munich student beheaded by the Nazis and the subject of a recent painful film. Does the perpetual banging of his drum serve to drown out an uncomfortable question? What has had the more devastating effect on the great European cultural tradition – the vile tyrannies that we all, in common with James, deplore, or television and American popular culture as gleefully espoused by James for half his professional life?

CULTURAL AMNESIA: Notes in the Margin of My Time by Clive James

Picador £25 pp876

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