According to Hitch's review of Clive James' breathtaking survey of 20th century figures, Cultural Amnesia, Sustan Sontag once defined the polymath as someone who is interested in everything, and nothing else. You see the applicability to James. How many readers of Slate had even heard the name Grigory Ordjonikidze before James' profile of the Stalinist who sort of saw the light before being killed? (Ordjonikidze, a fellow Georgian, was Stalin's main ally in the devastating folly of commanding the Red Army during Russian Civil War outside of Trotsky's sage military discipline.)
Meghan O'Rourke interviews Britain's best interviewer:
Slate: One of its enduring themes [of Cultural Amnesia] how we think about the legacy of totalitarianism, and how totalitarianism shaped the 20th century. Can you talk about how that became an preoccupation of yours?
James: Well, the intellectuals didn't perform very well in the 20th century. They read their best qualities into humans who didn't have them, which is a constant human theme. But I think you have to face the fact that the civilization we value in the 20th century might only exist in contention with totalitarianism; that it wouldn't be the way it is without it. And this might be true of all of history: that nothing is created except through disaster. Which is a fairly depressing conclusion to reach. But one thing I'm certain of is that totalitarianism hasn't gone away; totalitarian states may die out, but it will remain alive and vigorous. It is a spirit and virus. Religions can have it. People can have it. It's a solution. It's the dream solution. It's the delirious frenzy of certitude, which culture exists to contend against. One of the constant themes of the book is that any artist who fancies himself above politics is doing worse than dreaming. If you fancy yourself above politics you are actually in collaboration with the enemies of civilization, who would love you to think that. The book is built around the slow—painfully slow, sometimes—realization that in the 20th century, the forces of destruction are not open to reasoned argument, that they would track down any sort of reasoned argument and eliminate it on principle.