Cultural Amnesia
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In this book can be heard the merest edge of an enormous conversation. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room, wearing name tags in case they don’t recognize each other (although some recognize each other all too well, and avoid contact). My heroes and heroines are here. The reader will recognize some of their names, while other names will be more obscure. My intellectual bêtes noires are here too, and the same division might apply.
In April 2007, Cultural Amnesia was published in the USA, and since May 2007 it has been available in the UK, Australia and the Republic of Ireland. Four years of work went into the text — basically it is what I was doing after I vanished from the small screen in 2001 — so I was glad to see that bits and pieces of the finished product were being published as extracts in the UK, in the US and in my homeland, Australia. Finalising the manuscript would not have been possible without my editors at Norton. It might seem a pity to break pieces off their finished work, but I think the integrity of their concentrated effort can only stand revealed more clearly. The most comprehensive set of excerpts was run by Slate online magazine, based in New York. (You can see them by following the link below.) Under the guiding hand of Meghan O'Rourke, the first excerpt appeared in the afternoon of February 5 marked with the name of the subject, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. 24 more excerpts followed — a sumptuous aggregate which still represents only a small fraction of a large book. |
Cast List
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Anna Akhmatova
Peter Altenberg Louis Armstrong Raymond Aron Walter Benjamin Marc Bloch Jorge Luis Borges Robert Brasillach Sir Thomas Browne Albert Camus Dick Cavett Paul Celan Chamfort Coco Chanel Charles Chaplin Nirad C. Chaudhuri G. K. Chesterton Jean Cocteau Gianfranco Contini Benedetto Croce Tony Curtis Ernst Robert Curtius Miles Davis Sergei Diaghilev Pierre Drieu La Rochelle Alfred Einstein Duke Ellington |
W. C. Fields
F. Scott Fitzgerald Gustave Flaubert Sigmund Freud Egon Friedell François Furet Charles de Gaulle Edward Gibbon Terry Gilliam Joseph Goebbels Witold Gombrowicz William Hazlitt Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Heinrich Heine Adolf Hitler Ricarda Huch Ernst Jünger Franz Kafka John Keats Leszek Kołakowski Alexandra Kollontai Heda Margolius Kovály Karl Kraus Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Norman Mailer Nadezhda Mandelstam Golo Mann |
Heinrich Mann
Michael Mann Thomas Mann Mao Zedong Chris Marker John McCloy Zinka Milanov Czesław Miłosz Eugenio Montale Montesquieu Alan Moorehead Paul Muratov Lewis Namier Grigory Ordzhonokidze Octavio Paz Alfred Polgar Beatrix Potter Jean Prévost Marcel Proust Edgar Quinet Marcel Reich-Ranicki Jean-François Revel Richard Rhodes Rainer Maria Rilke Virginio Rognoni Ernesto Sabato Edward Said |
Sainte-Beuve
José Saramago Jean-Paul Sartre Erik Satie Arthur Schnitzler Sophie Scholl Wolf Jobst Siedler Manès Sperber Tacitus Margaret Thatcher Henning von Tresckow Leon Trotsky Karl Tschuppik [de] Dubravka Ugrešić Miguel de Unamuno Pedro Henríquez Ureña Paul Valéry Mario Vargas Llosa Evelyn Waugh Ludwig Wittgenstein Isoroku Yamamoto Aleksandr Zinoviev Carl Zuckmayer Stefan Zweig |