Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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And James clearly wants us to understand that his historical examples are meant to be contemporary and relevant, in that today’s Islamist totalitarianism has given us all the warning—precisely by its contempt for women—that we could possibly need. And I take it that this is what he wants us to do with the contents of Cultural Amnesia - talk exuberantly about the wealth which is there for the taking.

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James | Waterstones

We pay our respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism).

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James | Waterstones Cultural Amnesia by Clive James | Waterstones

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. Occasionally he turns his irony on himself in "On the Limits of Self-Improvement," a-three-part piece in which he dispatches himself to a spa in the effort to improve his less than perfect physical being.He wrote a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (2013), a collection of essays, Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014 (2014) and an analysis of the radical change in TV viewing habits, Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook (2016). After all, Latin “declined” into Dante’s Italian (which James elsewhere exhorts us to learn) and Valery’s French, didn’t it?