One of James’s charms as a critic is that he genuinely seems to enjoy praising people. (An early collection of his poems was actually titled Fan Mail.) But in order to appear ungrudging, he is sometimes hyperbolic, and therefore unconvincing: Is it really apt to write of Camus that “the Gods poured success on him but it could only darken his trench coat: it never soaked him to the skin”? Or of Flaubert that “he searched the far past, and lo! He found a new dawn”?

Yet much may be forgiven a man who can begin a paragraph by saying, “It will be argued that Heinrich Heine was not Greta Garbo,” or who can admit that for years he has been authoritatively mispronouncing the name Degas and the word empyrean. If you open Cultural Amnesia in the hope of getting a bluffer’s guide to the intellectuals, you will be disappointed; but if you read it as an account of how an educator has himself been self-educated, you will be rewarded well enough.

The book's bulk is impressive, as if its 900 pages were the product of cerebration on steroids. James himself views it as a Herculean labour, remarking that it has taken him 40 years to write. Halfway through, he worries that it might be "a folly", like one of those overgrown, impractical architectural projects designed by eighteenth-century dilettanti who built pagodas or zigurrats onto their Georgian houses. James's twinge of panic is justified: Cultural Amnesia, I am sorry to say, is incoherent, garbled and ultimately pointless, meandering through a series of endless circuits inside his crowded, voluminous head. In its way, it's a noble folly, quaintly and quixotically idealistic. But it is also, from time to time, merely foolish. During those four decades of toil, James apparently lost sight of what kind of book he wanted to write - or rather he has ended up writing several contradictory, self-cancelling books at once, producing an amorphous, myriad-minded monologue whose structure and purpose are far from clear...

The varying subtitles of Cultural Amnesia acknowledge its mental muddle. The proof copy I read proclaims that these are "Necessary Memories from History and the Arts", which sounds sternly prescriptive: we are expected to absorb this elephantine curriculum with its immemorial wisdom. But the Australian edition is subtitled "Notes in the Margin of My Times", which sounds more plaintively peripheral. Notes, however, do not generally accumulate into such an onerous pile, and marginalia, like the so-called nature strips in the Hobart suburb where I grew up, are kept under control by the narrowness of the space in which they're scribbled. James is a brilliant columnist, unbeatable if confined to a couple of thousand zippy words. But a few hundred columns do not add up to a cathedral.