Although each of these essays is titled after some notable (though sometimes forgotten) figure, the names are just points of departure. An essay on Miles Davis is actually about the cushioning and corrupting effects of money on artists, while an essay called “Sir Thomas Browne” is about book titles. (Mr. James raided Browne’s Urn Burial for his 1977 collection of television writing, Visions Before Midnight.) Some titles are a tease. You can learn much about Anna Akhmatova from the essay below her name, but next to nothing about Evelyn Waugh from “Evelyn Waugh.”

Some figures, like the Nazi collaborator and sputtering anti-Semite Robert Brasillach, who published the names of Jews so that the Gestapo could find them more easily, seem to have been included solely as negative examples, a foul smell wafted toward us for a few pages. Don’t forget this, the author seems to say. Maybe you’ll recognize it when you smell it again.

Although he takes aim at literary theory, academic obscurantism, racism, reverse-racism and intellectual dishonesty of every stripe, Mr. James’ recurrent theme is the danger of political ideologies. Signing onto an ideology entails ignoring all evidence to the contrary. It’s a mind-shutting maneuver. His particular targets are “intellectuals who shamed themselves and their calling by bringing superior mental powers to the defence of misbegotten political systems that were already known to be dispensing agony to the helpless.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, please stand up.)

Writers who earn Mr. James’ praise are those who, like George Orwell and Thomas Mann, eventually loosened up their rigid politics, or at least began to take in the darker implications of their early beliefs.

Mr. James’ tone ranges from confiding to bombastic, and he’s entertaining at either extreme. His conclusions are brilliantly reasoned, but his relentless focus on World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges and extreme authoritarianism is enough to convince you that there were no hula hoops, no soap operas, no cupcakes in the 20th century—in fact, that intellectual seriousness demands that there be no cupcakes. His essay titled “Coco Chanel” devotes one paragraph to her achievements in fashion, the rest to the concept of small luxuries, culminating with the 70 years of deprivation suffered by ordinary Soviet citizens.

But also—as with every mid-century French figure that Mr. James mentions—he points out Chanel’s degree of collaboration during the Occupation. Collaboration is more than a minor theme of Cultural Amnesia. We get examples of great bravery (the historian Marc Bloch, tortured and killed for fighting with the Resistance), good intentions (Albert Camus, who played down his modest anti-Nazi efforts) and self-serving zeal (Jean-Paul Sartre, who called for the death of collaborators when his own resistance was slight). Mr. James is even more alert to the whereabouts and political activities of German intellectuals before and during the war, and his essay on Jorge Luis Borges focuses on his tacit support for an increasingly brutal Argentine regime.

Wielding his scissor hands, Mr. James cuts many a famous writer down to size. But he also proves a generous guide to the century, offering reminiscences from his writing life and common-sense asides about translations, the best biographies, the importance of at least a basic reading knowledge of Spanish. His focus may veer without warning, but his prose is clear and quotable. Trading jokes with Jay Leno wasn’t a conversation, but “more like mouth-to-mouth assassination.” The Gods “poured success on [Camus] but it could only darken his trench coat: it never soaked him to the skin.”

At over 800 pages, this is a weighty tome in more ways than one, but the only unreadable parts come when Mr. James pulls the wings off a joke or a poetic effect by trying to explain how the writer came by it. Norman Mailer wrote, “In the middle classes, the remark, ‘He made a lot of money,’ ends the conversation. If you persist, if you try to point out that that money was made by digging through his grandmother’s grave to look for oil, you are met with a middle-class shrug.” In admiration, Mr. James manages to stretch Mailer’s moment of inspiration by another 10 sentences: “You are having a drink with him, and he wants to describe someone who will do anything for money. The standard idea comes into his head of a man selling his mother or grandmother. Instantly he sees that the idea needs improvement …. ”

These passages, and any mention of Stalin past about page 300, feel like being cornered at a party. The wet kiss can’t be far behind.

Readers who chafe at the author’s constant recourse to Stalin will find a partial explanation at the end of a critique of “desk-bound Western intellectuals” who persist in describing Stalin as a military genius, when it was his indifference to suffering and waste that allowed him to send millions of soldiers to their deaths. “I still can’t believe that these obscenities happened in my time,” Mr. James writes, “and that during the Anzac Day march through Sydney in 1946 I was actually wearing a forage cap with a badge on it celebrating Stalin’s heroism and genius.”

Clive James wants the rest of us to rip off our badges—then we can join the rambling, unrehearsed and irresistible conversation that humanism makes possible. “When we talk about the imponderables of life, we don’t really mean that we can’t ponder them,” he writes. “We mean that we can’t stop.”

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

On the morning I went to see it, each visitor accorded Giacometti’s art an almost religious obeisance, whether it was a student clad in tattered jeans or a well-heeled gent with (one imagines) money to burn. Everyone spoke in whispers; the stray ringing of a cell phone set off reproachful looks and ardent apologies. The installation, deliberately paced and dramatically lit, encourages reverence. And the work itself commands the sort of grave attention that cuts the chatter.

If the unhurried tour offered by The Women of Giacometti doesn’t glance upon every facet of the artist’s career, it comes close. The earliest piece on view was painted when he was 19 years old; it’s a Cézanne-like painting of his sister Ottilia. Early efforts in sculpture—a plaster bust of Ottilia; a roughhewn, Cubist-inspired portrayal of Flora Mayo, an American who studied alongside him—are more convincing. (Both pieces date from around 1926.) A preternatural, if still unrefined, gift for working in three dimensions is clearly evident.

A representative sampling of the primitivist sculptures that put Giacometti in good standing with the Surrealists is on display, including the Guggenheim’s renowned Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932). There’s a better selection of the late work, with its anxious, skeptical tone and solitary figures (elongated in the sculpture, ghost-like in the paintings). These latter pieces famously induced André Breton’s ire. The “Black Pope of Surrealism” found them insufficiently radical and booted Giacometti from the camp. Giacometti happily took his leave: He’d had his fill of what he called Surrealist “masturbation,” pegging the failings of that crowd with devastating accuracy.

Few painters in the history of art have been as relentless as Giacometti in exploring the meaning of perception. His self-appointed task was the accurate transcription of observed phenomenon, but it was his belief that attempting to fix an always-mutable physical reality, whether it be in oils or plaster, was folly. It’s well known—among his admirers, at least—that he considered himself a failure. A profound sense of despair permeates the work, but it wasn’t the existentialist romance foisted upon it by Jean-Paul Sartre, Giacometti’s friend and booster. Rather, it was occasioned by the vexing pursuit of giving tangible and permanent form to fleeting, ever-changing incident.

In paintings like Portrait of Caroline (1962) and Caroline Seated with a Red Dress (1965), he entombs the title character within jittery skeins of oil paint. Overlapping and lilting lines are typically left loose in the torso, but they coalesce into an almost sculptural mass in the face. The effect is discomfiting, even nerve-wracking, but irresistible in its pull. Giacometti makes his doubt plain. No brushstroke is arbitrary; no hesitation escapes comment. Caroline Seated with a Red Dress has an almost expressionist fervor, yet it stubbornly retains a clinical adherence to physical fact—a thrilling paradox.

Alas, The Women of Giacometti also makes plain what MoMA’s 2001 retrospective intimated: History has been kinder to the painter than to the sculptor. You hate to say it, particularly given the somber majesty of Giacometti’s achievement, but, boy, are those lumpy, spindly figures looking hokey. They’re even worse when they’re placed atop carriages or inside boxes: Giacometti’s attempt to locate the sculptures in space can be self-conscious and, at times, alarmingly arch. The paintings can come precariously close to mannerism; the sculptures don’t fight it off at all. An innate knack for sculpture led to a slackening of aesthetic vigilance, which in turn led to indulgence—albeit of a dour variety.

The extreme exaggeration of anatomy, the frazzled and theatrical textures, the bathetic dénouement—the sculptures aren’t much ado about nothing exactly, but Giacometti striving for effect is something less than Giacometti the master. When comparisons to Rodin flit into one’s mind, second thoughts follow soon thereafter. Fortunately, the painter responsible for canvases as unflinching and grand as The Artist’s Mother (1950) and Seated Woman (1958) emerges unscathed. That’s reason enough to cherish this splendidly conceived, intelligently executed exhibition.

The Women of Giacometti is at Pace Wildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, until Dec. 17.

My uncertainty about the 9/11 dramas has little to do with questions of "taste," more with opportunism and special pleading. It would take the greatest of playwrights to enlarge our already broken hearts and weary minds about an unspeakable drama that we all witnessed. But if my doubts are misplaced, I do at least know how I feel about dinner parties like Omnium Gatherum 's. They are to be avoided.

As its ridiculous society hostess, Suzie-a not-too-subtle satire of Martha Stewart, who's long since satirized herself-puts it with glib self-satisfaction at the close: "A dinner party is only as good as the guests." No truer words are spoken the entire night.

Here I ought to confess, perhaps, that I myself usually find dinner parties hard work unless I know everyone there. In which case, I tend to return home moaning ungraciously, "Why can't we meet anyone new? " For instance, I've attended dinner parties when Christopher Hitchens has been a guest more often than either of us would wish. But the reassuring thing about him is that you need never utter a word; he speaks for all. Alas-for me, anyway-one of the dinner guests in Omnium Gatherum is a political pundit and drunk British loudmouth who's meant as a parody of Mr. Hitchens. I mean, can't we meet anyone new ?

Never mind the other guests for the moment. How was the food? The banquet served during Omnium Gatherum is billed as "by Alfred Portale," and the actors were wolfing down everything in sight between their lines. Well, you know what actors are like. They're always hungry .

From the amuse bouche to the wild Columbia River salmon served on a tower of ruby crescent fingerling potatoes, confit tomato and poached fennel with warm champagne vinaigrette; to the roasted Moroccan spiced lamb with couscous, curried corn, cumin-scented carrots, harissa and preserved lemon; to the Belgian endive and Anjou pear salad with toasted walnuts, Roquefort cheese and fresh walnut oil (not domestic); to the Tri-Star strawberry mille-feuilles with mascarpone custard, orange flower water, pineapple mint and strawberry coulis drizzled with 25-year-old Balsamico Traditionale, we had a perfect combination for today: gourmet food and celebrities.

Besides the obvious, easy targets of Martha and Christopher, there's Tom-Tom Clancy, who's reincarnated here as a flag-waving, best-selling novelist and fascist ignoramus named Roger. There's also a Palestinian scholar who's a pedestrian pedant named Khalid. Intended to be the intellectual of the squabbling group, he comes out with unsayable stuff like, "So we are, then, all of us seeking, let's say, a false oneness to pull us through the demanding duality of life."

Khalid is modeled on Edward W. Said, who died of leukemia just as the play was opening. The authors weren't to know of Said's last struggle, and they should lampoon whomever they want, dead or alive. They also portray their resident Palestinian sympathetically as the lonely "Voice of Reason." But the loss of Said, the polymath and truly principled man of challenging ideas, only reminds us further of the complete coarsening of all ideas here.

Attending the dinner party of Omnium Gatherum is like overdosing on those shrill screamers of Crossfire . There's nothing in it for us except cheap sound bites. Much of Omnium Gatherum isn't acted, but shouted. (Just like TV.) Occasionally the ominous whir of helicopters is heard to remind us of the evening's dark "relevance." The sound bites that are meant to pass as social satire and serious moral debate in the shadow of 9/11 last about two minutes each. Nothing too taxing, then; nothing to trouble us at all.

Among the stew of topics that crop up superficially in a checklist marked "Relevant Discourse," "Laughs" and "Surprise!" are the following:

American capitalism versus Third World poverty; the appeal of gloriously appointed bathrooms; Ghandi versus Hitler; prepared food; East and West culture; veganism; the danger of entertainment conglomerates; the exploitation of cheap Third World labor; meaning; Star Trek ; faith, real or imagined; Israel versus Palestine; terrorism and peace; cruel Times book reviewers .... But, alas, there isn't a single idea that's fresh or untrivialized in shouting matches that pander to prejudice and ignorance.

"Unbridled capitalism has long been a concern to the global community," announces Khalid, offering just the sort of pompous platitude that would send anyone to sleep. But the social-climbing ditz of a hostess with the lifestyle empire and attention-deficit disorder interrupts Khalid to say to Julia, "Love your jacket. Is that Donna's?"

It gets laughs. Donna. Well, we know .... All the guests are types with second-rate minds. Lydia is the neurotic feminist and fundamentalist vegan. (How would you like to be at a dinner party with her? ) Julia is the African-American writer and tedious, blanket dogmatist who sings Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All" badly. (The joke is she can't sing; it's a tired sitcom routine.) But let's take stock: We have the ridiculous Martha hostess; the drunk, leftish Brit; the bullying American patriot; the Palestinian intellectual; the feminist; and the African-American. There's also a fireman.

Now, what dinner party would be complete without a pet fireman? Unless the fireman is symbolic .

Warning! I am about to give the plot away. There's "A Surprise Guest" who's brought on during the salad. He's a terrorist named Mohammed.

And by now, the evening has become as unhinged as the world it's trying to satirize. Dramatic scenes ensue. Jeff, the fireman, has summarized a meaningful Star Trek episode for us, but otherwise he hasn't said much. That's because he's dead. He died in the towers (and relates how he died). Mohammed is dead, too. "No virgins," he observes (to laughter).

And those are the insights, and those are the jokes. And Jean-Paul Sartre, where are you now? He's in hell, actually. And he's thinking, "I knew I was right!" It seems to me that Omnium Gatherum -Latin for "a collection of peculiar souls," you know-detonates on its own silliness. The evening ends on an apocalyptic note, a somber warning as all dance merrily to "I've Got the World on a String." Food for thought there! Foolish people existed before 9/11 and will exist until the end of time. But do you want to have dinner with them?

Today, in the memoir quoted above, which was written for the catalogue of the current Alberto Giacometti exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine-an exhibition largely based on Mr. Lust's collection-he describes himself as "a 73-year-old investment banker who still joyously works 40 hours a week but spends his evenings and weekends studying art and literature." Mr. Lust's memoir is devoted to the story of his friendship with Giacometti, whom he met soon after his arrival in Paris.

At the Sorbonne, Mr. Lust was promptly invited to attend the weekly salon of Jean Wahl, his philosophy professor, and it was there, he writes, that he "met many famous people, but also relative unknowns like John Russell, who, far more involved in literature than art then, was to become a famous writer and art critic." At what he describes as "a regal luncheon" given by Russell, the young Herbert Lust was seated next to Giacometti, who was, he writes, "completely unknown to me."

This is his account of his first impression of the artist, who, because of the tenor of his conversation that day, Mr. Lust assumed was a writer: "Alberto was arguing with someone about André Breton. His opponent was claiming that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was wrong in attacking Breton for being either a fool or dishonest. I knew how much Sartre owed to the Surrealists, but just through literature. Here I was hearing about it on the actual battlefield. Alberto began defending Sartre. He pointed out that until Breton was drafted in World War II, he was a pacifist who saw little, if any, difference between Hitler and the democracies since both were capitalists. All this excited me, a young American hick at last listening to literary talk in the real world. I believed that Alberto must be an important literary critic, and I was anxious to know him."

When the artist finally turned to Mr. Lust and asked about his background, the "young American hick" made up a story. "At that time," he writes, "all my emotions and actions were governed by great writers or heroes in novels. Determined to conquer Paris, I had decided on a strategy to emulate Julien Sorel, the hero of The Red and the Black by Stendhal. In the novel, Sorel had to choose between being a nobody and being honest, or being somebody and a hypocrite. He chose the latter, and in doing so, became a romantic tragic hero."

In keeping with this role, Mr. Lust poured out to Giacometti what he describes as "my sad story about how I was a Romanian Jew who had survived the war with my family, just to end up being at odds with the Communists who then murdered my father. This fabricated story continued with a harrowing escape walking across the Carpathian mountains barefoot. I spun a tale of piercing weeks where my body was a hunted animal living on insects and drinking from streams, and finally my indescribable joy one day when I caught a fish and devoured it raw. This yarn took about 15 minutes. Alberto was transfixed."

When the luncheon ended, Giacometti gave Mr. Lust his studio address and invited him to drop by any afternoon. That was how he discovered that Giacometti was an artist. "After he left," he writes, "I asked John Russell about him. He told me that Alberto was famous.… The existentialists had heralded him as our time's most significant artist. Sartre had even written a long article on him."

So began their friendship and Mr. Lust's adventures in the art world. The next afternoon, he called upon Giacometti in his ramshackle studio on the Rue Hippolyte-Maindron-the studio to which I was myself taken to spend an afternoon with Giacometti some eight years later. Like everyone else who visited that studio for the first time, Mr. Lust was startled by its sheer shabbiness. "Here was a famous man in a hovel," he writes. "It made no sense. The place wasn't even clean. Shabbiness reigned."

The conversation was anything but shabby, however. The talk was of Breton and Surrealism and Nietzsche and of their own life experiences. Mr. Lust admitted that his tale of woe as a Romanian refugee was a complete fiction, and Giacometti was more amused than disturbed. It was now Mr. Lust's turn to be transfixed. He had acquired a friend in this illustrious artist, and over time he became a connoisseur and collector of Giacometti's work. In 1970, he produced Giacometti: The Complete Graphics , and is now at work on a more extensive account of his friendship with the artist. At their last meeting in September 1961-the artist died in 1966 at the age of 65-Giacometti gave Mr. Lust some sage advice about his personal problems, and then made him a gift of two portraits he had drawn of him, one in pencil and the other with a ball-point pen. Both drawings are included in the Portland exhibition, along with other Giacometti works from the Lust collection, over 50 in all. It is a very affecting exhibition, and made all the more so by Mr. Lust's beautiful memoir, which leaves one keen to read the fuller version he is now writing.

Alberto Giacometti remains on exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art through Sept. 10.