"Perhaps all the best books," wrote Robert Westall in Signal, "start by being written for only one child, and that child very close to you. They start when the child-within-the-author turns to the real child and says, 'Come away with me and I will show y...

Clive James has a high-maintenance girlfriend: the reader. To educate this girlfriend, to correct her wayward mind and haphazard schooling, he has written more than 100 loosely related essays on artists, intellectuals and tyrants, mostly of the 20th century—a crash course in modern history and...