Wednesday 9 July 2008

 

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Liz Anderson

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Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

A gallery of pen portraits

Clive James
Picador, pp. 876pp, ££25,
Alberto Manguel
Wednesday, 8th August 2007

Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time
by Clive James

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Trying to explain the limits of his Parallel Lives, Plutarch compared the work of historians to that of cartographers who must

crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but the sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice or a frozen sea.

History, for Plutarch, is the text we all can read, surrounded by an illegible flow of events too far in the past or too distant in the future. Clive James has reversed Plutarch’s layout. In the centre of his page lies what he calls ‘the bewildering complexity of civilised life’ hated by its ‘Procrustean enemies’, while on the margins he has scribbled limpid notes that chart the bogs and icy wastes of our 20th century, intrepidly criss-crossed by some of James’s favourite explorers.

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