“... because the wife has all the power.’ So they spent the evening at a Portuguese-run restaurant in West Kensington called the Village Fayre, where the conversation never stopped for the six people at the corner table. Miguel brought the car. About 10 p.m. Ines began agitating because she had a chemistry exam in the morning. She said she would just head back to ...”

“... can also be seen in the work of the historian with whom Ginzburg can perhaps best be compared, Anthony Grafton, another astonishing comet of learning. The two, each from Jewish families with a political background, one in Turin, the other Manhattan, share a common starting-point in seasons in London at the Warburg Institute, with the influence of Arnaldo ...”

“... one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching his ...”