“... Pasolini had become friends in the 1950s, when she helped him get his long poem ‘The Ashes of Gramsci’ published in Nuovi Argomenti, the journal edited by her husband, the novelist Alberto Moravia. The marriage had long been an open one, and for two years in the early 1950s Morante had been obsessively involved with the filmmaker Luchino Visconti, one ...”

“... in a more than bureaucratic sense had arrived. Its artificers were new too: the intellectuals. As Gramsci wrote in the Prison Notebooks, the function of modern intellectuals is inseparable from being torn between past and future. Their task is to reconcile the ‘tradition’ of established rulers with the inescapable appeal of the new, whether by compromise ...”

“... fashion. The single most powerful figure in the government was the minister of finance, Antonio Palocci, a mayor from the interior of São Paulo, who had been the inspiration behind the ‘Letter to the Brazilians’, Lula’s electoral billet-doux to the business community, and the key broker for the PT’s backdoor transactions with banks and ...”

“... recurs all too frequently in Interesting Times, assigned to thinkers like Raymond Williams or Gramsci. Perhaps there is an earlier strain of plumpes Denken too. These might help explain the curious absence of ideas from his self-portrait. Or more simply, setting aside any cultural factors, there could be a temperament in which a no-nonsense ...”

“... of prime minister), was the most notoriously corrupt single politician in the ranks of the PT, Antonio Palocci, the toast of big business when he was Lula’s finance minister, before being forced to resign after a particularly ugly scandal in 2006. His reappearance in 2010 was greeted with delight by the Economist, but it soon emerged that in the interim ...”