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.

'One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance' - Simon Schama, historian and author of  The Power of Art

A lifetime in the making and containing over one hundred essays, this is a definitive guide to twentieth-century culture. James catalogs and explores the careers of many of the century's greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers, with illuminating excursions into the minds of those historical figures – from Sir Thomas Browne to Montesquieu – who paved the way. Altogether, it is an illuminating work of extraordinary erudition.