When I was at school we had a teacher* who recommended that we make notes on every book we read. [*It was John Boulter, Olympic athlete and British 1000m record-holder in 1969. He took us for French, although we always sensed his heart was never entirely in it. However, he led us on a brief tour around the whole of French Literature, a course which, although irrelevant in terms of exam results, was a source of long-term inspiration. He came late to a lesson one Saturday morning, with his pyjamas clearly visible under his jacket. He was newly-married at the time and we prurient adolescents fondly imagined that he had only minutes before torn himself from his young wife's amorous embraces! We called him "Boggle" Boulter. I can't remember why, but it was somehow perfect.] Each work, he suggested, should be the subject of a short précis, an indication of the major issues and a quotation or two, all on one side of A4. Accumulated sheets, carefully filed, would ultimately constitute an invaluable reference source. I never got round to it, of course, but the idea must have struck me as a good one or I wouldn't have remembered it. And now that I have read countless books, the contents of most of which have been effectively consigned to oblivion, I regret that I didn't follow Boggle's advice. There is something terribly humiliating about our capacity to forget. So much experience, so much interest, so much information, so much understanding, all just so much water under the bridge. Our instinct to gather together all this material in an orderly, structured, meaningful way is a very powerful one. In a sense, this diary is an expression of that instinct.

So it was with an intense combination of admiration and envy that I read Clive James' "Cultural Amnesia", which is the product of a whole lifetime spent reading with a pencil to hand. He has, with incredible ambition, sought to compile all the thoughts he ever noted in the margins of a book into a coherent whole, relating his copious reading to the catastrophic history of the 20th century and distilling from all of that a Weltanschauung of sorts. Clive James is a hard man not to like. Above all he is funny. He writes vigorously, intelligently, perceptively, on subjects ranging from Margaret Thatcher to Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is particularly strong on the group of pre-war (largely Jewish) intellectuals, writers and wits that constituted Viennese café society. His special favourite is Egon Friedell (of whom I had not heard previously):

Egon Friedell (1878-1938), a student of natural sciences who graduated to the twin status of cabaret star and polymath, was a figure unparalleled even in Vienna, where there were several learned cabaret artists and even a few funny polymaths, but nobody else who could be both those things on such an heroic scale. To think of an equivalent in an English-speaking context is impossible: you would have to imagine a combination of George Saintsbury, Aldous Huxley, Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Clark and Isaiah Berlin.

It is difficult not to suspect that Clive James rather fancies himself as a latter-day Egon Friedell. Well, Clive James is, if not a polymath, certainly an avid reader, who takes the idea of culture seriously, i.e. someone who didn't stop reading set books the day he graduated. He can also make you laugh out loud. His inherent qualities of common decency and natural humanity come through on every page. "Cultural Amnesia" is also inspirational in the sense that it makes you want straightaway to order all the books he writes about. If I have a reservation, it is that Clive James is too omnipresent in a book which amounts to some 850 pages. As a journalist he is unsurpassed. While still at school we used to devour his scintillating TV reviews, which we mined for clever things to say. But a whole book! It's a bit like going on a month's camping holiday with someone with an automatic compunction to be clever at all times. There are occasions when he might have benefitted from a teacher with a red biro writing "stick to the point"! I suppose it's Clive James' book and he can write what he likes, but too often you feel a bit like Old Mother Hubbard. Opening the book at what you imagine to be a particularly juicy chapter, you are disappointed when it barely touches upon its purported subject. I rushed to the essay on Heinrich Heine, hoping for an idiot's guide to a poet of whom I know too little, only to get a load of hot tips on how to deal with inconvenient fans. So, for James and Heine, both, celebrity is a terrible drag! Another slightly irritating trait is his weakness for the polyglot name-drop. We are constantly reminded, en passant, of his linguistic facility in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. I'm sorry, but I can't help being a bit sceptical. I've seen too many CV's claiming that their authors are "fluent" in French, say, when, in point of fact, they are barely able to order a beer. But if you must do the foreign name-drop, get it right! Schoolboy howlers like "der Stadt" or "ungülcklich" undermine confidence. Elsewhere, pointscoring efforts are converted into own goals through shoddy research. Regretting the demise of rote-learning and showing off his capacity to remember Tennyson's "The Brook", he proceeds to misquote it: "I come from haunts of coot and hern". "Hern"? A cross between a hen and a tern, perhaps?

So what theme does emerge from the "apparent randomness", as Clive James describes his own work? One consistently returning idea is that the only viable antidote to totalitarian inhumanity is "liberal humanism". These terms are never defined in any detail, but he means them to be more than just the usual euphemisms for capitalism and atheism . What James is really seeking to define is the sort of society which permits and encourages basic decency and intellectual curiosity. A world safe, in other words, for Clive James. It's a nice idea, but probably not enough. Despite his instictive revulsion at and morbid fascination for the totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth century, and despite his avowed admiration for the author, he has overlooked the central issue which Michael Burleigh identified so clearly in "The Third Reich" and "Sacred Causes". Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism are not just political movements, they are pseudo religions. In the absence of a genuine sense of the numinous, these spiritual Ersatz products fill the God-shaped space in the human soul. The only true antidote to mass psychosis is a human life nourished by a genuine sense of meaning and purpose. Literature and culture, however entertaining, however intellectually stimulating, can, at best, only hint at the possibility of this greater synthesis.

While I was studying at Leuven, our lecturer in semiotics (God help us) suggested that we really ought to read one book and see one film every day! Even at that impossible pace, you couldn't even begin to cover every game in town. It's the Jari Peteri syndrome. Jari is a Finnish friend, who, sensing a kindred spirit, has put me in the way of a number of Finnish books and films. Most of the material has been translated into Swedish, the other national language, so I am able to read it. There's some fantastic stuff, but already endless. None of it features in Clive James' book. How could it? Not even he can read everything. We can only conclude that it is not in the vain pursuit of what the Tao Te Ching calls the ten thousand things, that meaning and purpose can ultimately be found:

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.