Here are the Modernist masters who barely appear in Civilisation. But, above all, here are the "Maya carvings and Islamic pots" and "a splendid mask from the Torres Straits" — three civilisations in a sentence, all mentioned with great reverence — and the personal and artistic connections between these and Picasso. Here are exactly the kind of cultural range and, above all, connections, that were missing in Civilisation. And, as the book continues, there are moving tributes to art from India, Japan and Egypt. "My enjoyment," he writes, "covers a very wide field — Egyptian, Byzantine, Indian, Chinese, Japanese", though he admits that they are not his primary pleasures. "Mr Berenson used to say that we all have only a very few pennies to rattle about in our tins" and these non-European works "are not pennies that I can rattle in my tin". Nevertheless, he insists that "the finest works of Moghul art, whether in architecture or in such exacting media as jade, achieve a perfection that has never been surpassed." The Pearl Mosque and the Taj Mahal are "sublime works of art". Japanese art was his first love "and an album of Japanese drawings my most precious possession". Japanese artists "are supreme portraitists. As for the portrait of the priest Chogin (Shunjo) in the Todai-ji, I cannot think of anything in European art that so movingly unites realism with a profound feeling of veneration." Japanese temples and gardens "will always be an endless joy". Civilisation was by no means Clark's only venture into broadcasting. He presented more than 50 programmes on art, mainly for ITV but also for the BBC, over 20 years, between 1958 and 1977. Most were about European art, but they also included a three-part series on Japanese art (1963) and Great Temples of the World (1964-66), which included Luxor as well as Chartres.

There's no denying the focus on European art in Civilisation. Not just European art but Western European art. It is a series about the great masterpieces of France, Holland, Germany, Italy and Britain. Spain barely appears — no Velázquez, Goya or Picasso. Eastern Europe and Russia don't feature. Like The World at War, produced just a few years later, the focus is on the West, not on Eastern Europe, still in the deep freeze of the Cold War. But slicing the cake is always the problem for any large TV documentary series. Thirteen hours is not long to evoke 1,300 years of art and Clark's successors will find it a challenge to fit many other civilisations into one series. MacGregor's Radio 4 series, after all, had a hundred programmes.

These passages from Clark's memoir remind us of something else: his tremendous erudition. Not only was he well travelled (he saw these Indian buildings and Japanese temples in person). He was enormously well read and thoughtful. Take the title of the first volume of his memoirs, Another Part of the Wood. It conflates, he later wrote, "the stage directions in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Another Part of the Forest) with the opening of Dante's Inferno . . . (I found myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost)." This isn't just more DWEMs, Shakespeare and Dante. It is what great art, in this case literature, means to someone's life.

Civilisation is full of such erudition. Confident assertions and generalisations, a great sweep of knowledge. "Three or four times in history," he says in episode two, "man has made a leap forward that would have seemed unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary circumstances." He compares the "extraordinary outpouring of energy" in 12th-century France with the appearance of civilisation in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley around 3000 BC; the moment in late sixth-century Greece and India when there was an explosion of knowledge and spiritual enlightenment; and 1000AD when in India, China, Byzantium and Western Europe, "an intensification of existence" took place. "People sometimes wonder why the Italian Renaissance didn't make more of a contribution to philosophy," he argues later in the series. This may sometimes seem a little grand. But the sweep of knowledge, the ambition of the claims, is a world away from the TV history of broadcasters and journalists like Paxman and Marr today.