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that, seems to have come further faster. If Rome was the only
    one-time seat of totalitarian power that recovered instantly a glory that it had before, it was because the Italian brand of totalitarianism was less total: its bullhorn rhetoric and slovely
    inefficiency left too much of the humanist tradition intact. But the great burgeoning, on a world scale, of the post-Nazi liberal humanist impulse, a burgeoning which continues in the new
    post-Soviet era, took place and is still taking place in London and New York. The subsidiary English-speaking cities—Los Angeles, Chicago, Dublin, Sydney, Melbourne and many
    more—follow those two, and of those two, even London must follow New York. The reasons are so simple they often escape notice. Outstripping even Britain in its magnetic attraction for those
    who fled, America had the greater number of creative refugees, especially in their role as teachers: in New York, to stay alive, they taught music, painting, acting, everything. And Americahad the GI Bill of Rights. The ideal teachers met the ideal pupils, and the resulting story made Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idea the GI Bill was, into the most effective woman in
    the history of world culture up until that time, and continues to make her name a radiant touchstone for those who believe, as I do, that the potential liberation of the feminine principle is
    currently the decisive factor lending an element of constructive hope to the seething tumult within the world’s vast Muslim hegemony, and within the Arab world in particular. The secret of
    American cultural imperialism—the only version of American imperialism that really is irresistible, because it works by consent—is its concentration of all the world’s artistic
    and intellectual qualities in their most accessible form. The danger of American cultural imperialism is that it gives Americans a plausible reason for thinking that they can do without the
    world. But the world helped to make them what they now are—even Hollywood, the nation’s single most pervasive cultural influence, would be unimaginable without its immigrant
    personnel. One of the intentions of this book is to help establish a possible line of resistance against the cultural amnesia by which it suits us to forget that the convulsive mental life of the
    twentieth century, which gave the United States so much of the cultural power that it now enjoys, was a complex, global event that can be simplified only at the cost of making it unreal. If we
    can’t remember it all, we should at least have some idea of what we have forgotten. We could, if we wished, do without remembering, and gain all the advantages of travelling light; but a
    deep instinct, not very different from love, reminds us that the efficiency would be bought at the cost of emptiness. Finally the reason we go on thinking is because of a feeling. We have to keep
    that feeling pure if we can, and, if we ever lose it, try to get it back.

A

    Anna Akhmatova
    Peter Altenberg
    Louis Armstrong
    Raymond Aron

     

    ANNA AKHMATOVA

Born in Odessa, educated in Kiev and launched into poetic immortality as the beautiful incarnation
     of pre-revolutionary Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was the most famous Russian poet of her time, but the time was out of joint. Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Anna
     Andreyevna Gorenko, called Akhmatova, already wore the Russian literary world’s most glittering French verbal decorations: her work was avant-garde, and in person she was a femme
     fatale. Love for her broken-nosed beauty was a common condition among the male poets, one of whom, Nikolay Gumilev, she married. After the Revolution, Gumilev was one of the new
     regime’s first victims among the literati: the persecution of artists, still thought of today as a Stalinist speciality, began under Lenin. Later on, under Stalin, Akhmatova included a
     reference to Gumilev’s fate in the most often quoted part of her poem “Requiem.”