A gallery of pen portraits

Trying to explain the limits of his Parallel Lives, Plutarch compared the work of historians to that of cartographers who must

crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but the sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice or a frozen sea.

History, for Plutarch, is the text we all can read, surrounded by an illegible flow of events too far in the past or too distant in the future. Clive James has reversed Plutarch’s layout. In the centre of his page lies what he calls ‘the bewildering complexity of civilised life’ hated by its ‘Procrustean enemies’, while on the margins he has scribbled limpid notes that chart the bogs and icy wastes of our 20th century, intrepidly criss-crossed by some of James’s favourite explorers.

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

More than 100 parallel lives fill Cultural Amnesia’s close-to-900 pages, lives that, in James’s non-Euclidian universe, meet at one luminous point: Clive James himself, exemplar of his time, surviving witness of the past millennium’s final gasps. Cultural Amnesia is an intellectual autobiography, sufficiently lucid to efface its subject and sufficiently generous to include every one of its readers.

Plutarch’s method of choosing a series of notable figures to describe a historical period serves James as a model, but while Plutarch’s period stretches over ten centuries, James has modestly limited himself to one, the 20th, ‘out of which [James says, addressing himself to the younger readers] your century grew as surely as a column of black smoke grows from an oil fire’. This is no doubt more than enough, because James is one of those rare spirits whose library is, in a very real sense, universal and whose focused reading, in its very punctiliousness, includes (almost) everything.