The notables that stake out the territory of James’s zeitgeist are of all sorts: faithful and faithless, witty and ponderous, courageous and cowardly, nice and nasty, constellating something that the label ‘20th century’ only muddily evokes. From the first entry, on Anna Akhmatova, whose fate, that of becoming a heroine in Stalin’s Russia, is proof for James that history ‘is the story of everything that needn’t have been like that’, to the coda, tagged after the entry on Stefan Zweig, about a Viennese know-it-all called Eckstein (which ends with Hegel’s definition of history: ‘the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself’), Cultural Amnesia is that rarest of birds, a wise, witty, curiously optimistic and exhilarating book. The people James has chosen to include are his contemporaries, some benevolent, some wicked, fellow-travellers irrespective of the place and time in which they were born, whose visions, ideas, errors, accomplishments, failures and discoveries are now, to a smaller or greater extent, ours. The charts they drew must guide us and the trinkets they brought back from their excursions must serve us as amulets, if we are to rescue the regions we fear from the margins of Plutarch’s page.

‘It was the human mind that got us this far,’ says James, the cartographer, ‘by considering what had happened in history; by considering the good that had been done, and resolving to do likewise; and by considering the evil, and resolving to avoid its repetition.’ As a road map to survival, I cannot think of anything better.

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