Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (W.W. Norton, $35). An uncategorizable, unputdownable, utterly frank nine-hundred-page stroll through the bloody history of modernity, in which James serves up pithy, quote-driven miniature essays about key and not-so-key figures ranging from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, skewering countless hypocrites along the way. A splendidly readable exercise in cultural reclamation (TT).
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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