Camus, Hitler, Tony Curtis, Zweig, Coco Chanel, Said - the breadth is epic - though much of what he goes into ultimately comes down to the cruelty of man and our inner urges - particularly the banal pull of Totalitarianism. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career. He or she can—ambitiously—plunge in and read from beginning to end or simply decide to browse, and choose to read a piece at night before bed, or in the library, or alone in a café, which is where James always hoped these reflections might first be imbibed. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it.

If it can’t be sorted into satisfactory categories, that should make us take heart: it wouldn’t be the work of human beings if it could. Whether you agree with him or not about Portman, in James’ ardor, poor old guillotined Sophie Scholl gets lost in the Hollywood gush and semi-amateur movie casting. Sometimes he seems to hold these people up to some very demanding standards: he's convincing on Sartre's feeble response to Nazism, but surely it's a bit much to question why Wittgenstein never mention the Fascists in Philosophische Untersuchungen, a work of pure linguistic philosophy?

For my own part, it made me think hard about all the fields of creativity that I seemed to love equally, whatever their place in a supposed hierarchy.

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. As the time for assembling my reflections approached, I resolved that a premature synthesis was the thing to be avoided. James has the endearing and all-too-rare quality of assuming the same intellectual curiosity (and capacity) in his readers as he has in himself, and authors are consistently introduced with helpful comments on how amenable their work is to the student of French, German, Italian or whatever.Not yet, anyway’, or reminisces that ‘There was a time when I could fairly fluently read Russian, and get through a simple article in Japanese’ – but these self-criticisms are decidedly self-serving. I gave up 500 pages into War and Peace, but I was able to understand James' references to it later on in the text. The only answer comes from faith: faith that the rule of decency – which at last, and against all the odds, looks as if it might prevail – began in humanism, and can’t long continue without it.