Abridged for audio. Read by the author, Clive James.

With fascinating essays on towering figures from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic.

'One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance' – Simon Schama, historian and author of The Power of Art

A comprehensive survey of modern culture, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James' unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the twentieth-century. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record – and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.

'Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization' – J. M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace