Johann Hari

Out of all Clive James' dazzling and seemingly infinite volumes of autobiography, 'Cultural Amnesia' - the one that pretends not to be an autobiography at all - may be the best.

James has condensed into 876 pages the thinkers, thugs and prophets from the long twentieth century who he believes need to be rescued from the vacuum-pull of the memory hole and planted into the minds of the young before they vanish.

Each of his choices - from Jorge Luis Borges to Duke Ellington to Pol Pot - is given a brief biographical sketch, before James selects a resonant quote from them and riffs on it for ten pages or so. These riffs can lead almost anywhere: the section on romantic poet Heinrich Heine lead to a meditation on whether to sign autographs; the section on German satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg leads to a rumination on pornography.

This, then, is the autobiography of James' intellect and yes, it is self-indulgent - but what a self to indulge. He speaks nine languages (it feels as though the entire Tower of Babel has been shrunk to fit into his skull) and can unpretentiously cross-reference Argentinian poetry, early Hollywood and his dinners with Margaret Thatcher. Reading 'Cultural Amnesia' is like taking a long, warm bath in Clive James' brain-juices.

But this is not a random collection of observations. It has a driving purpose: to make the case for doubtful, democratic liberal humanism, by looking at the greatest products of the creative impulse - and the people who happily tossed them onto the fire. Swirling through the book there are perfect little distillations of people: Sigmund Freud "was the victim of his own poetry, which was so vivid that he took it to be a map of reality." Adolf Hitler was "mad enough to think himself sane." Under Mao, "information rarely travelled further than a scream could be heard."

There are certain milieux that James keeps returning to throughout the book, obsessed and depressed: the vibrant Jewish coffee houses of 1920s Vienna, and their photographic negative - the cowed, compromised coffee-houses of Occupied Paris. His hero is Egon Friedell, who alternated between being the great cabaret artist of his time and being "the polymath's polymath", burying into a vast private library and writing 'The Cultural History of the Modern Age' - the model for this book.

There are certain villains who stalk the book too, and are given long-deserved, long-neglected kickings. Jean-Paul Sartre is, James writes, "a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil, because the advocate was smarter." He describes a scene where Sartre was just a few feet away from a room of innocent, terrorised Russian prisoners - lecturing on the wonders of the Soviet system.

James articulates his humanist values with such infectious learning and tender conviction that it is startling - and dismaying - when suddenly, in the middle of the book, they lapse.

During a rumination on the documentary maker Chris Marker, James segues into the Tampa boat incident, one of the hellish scars on recent Australian history. In 2001, a boat packed with refugees fleeing the Taliban approached the coast of Australia. The hard-right government of John Howard refused to allow it to dock, and invented the shocking lie that the refugees were deliberately drowning their own children in order to gain sympathy. The refugees were diverted to island prison camps, where many were so distressed their sewed up their own lips in protest. James instinctively and clearly takes the side of the Australian government, even saying their slander was "quite plausible".

In the spirit of James at his best, it seems appropriate to respond with a generous quote. Like Walt Whitman, he is large; he contains multitudes. He holds within himself a shimmering defence of liberal humanism and a nasty conservative pessimism about humanity, and so does his book.

The only other flaw here is with the book's central metaphor. James is not really battling against cultural amnesia. No: he is fighting against cultural diabetes, the sickness that afflicts a culture when our diet consists of nothing but the sugar-stimulants of television and video games and lads' mags. He is showing his readers that there are far richer rewards in the slower work of "the life of the mind", and he offers one of the best shots of insulin available.

You can read an interview I did with Clive James when I was still a student (and where he began to bleed in the middle of the interview) here.

You can read other book reviews I've written here.