Cultural Amnesia

Slate has a nice collection of over 20 essays by Clive James, all adapted from his most recent book Cultural Amnesia, a diverse 'compendium of the intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who shaped the 20th century', such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Duke Ellington, Jorge Luis Borges, Stefan Zweig, and Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Born into a wealthy Viennese family, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was the glamour boy of English philosophy in the 20th century, and in the new millennium his influence continues to be potent. If there are still English philosophers who seem to prefer it when nothing is discussed except the means of discussion, their memories of Wittgenstein are probably the reason. Before World War I, there was a period when only Bertrand Russell knew who Wittgenstein was. After valuable false starts as a student of engineering in Berlin and Manchester, Wittgenstein had come to Cambridge to study mathematical logic under Russell, who had the humility (a virtue of Russell's that offset many of his vices) to spot an intellect potentially superior to his own. During the Great War, Wittgenstein fought for Austria as an artillery officer. Captured by the Italians, in the prison camp at Monte Cassino he completed the work we now know as the Tractatus ­Logico-­Philosphicus, a set of aphorisms based on the principle that language is a combination of propositions picturing the facts of which the world is composed. Under the impression that he had brought philosophy to an end, Wittgenstein gave away his money and took up the simple life in Austria as a schoolteacher, a gardener's assistant, and an amateur architect...