“... of ministers, and refuse to sign legislation. In 2003 the incumbent was the former central banker Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, an ornament of the centre-left who had headed the final government of the First Republic, served as finance minister under Prodi, and is today a senator for the Democratic Party. Imperturbably, Ciampi signed exceptional legislation not only ...”

“... overseen instead by a French professor, after intervention from Pavese’s left-wing friend Leone Ginzburg. Thus began the image of Pavese as a left-wing activist and the comforting illusion that the translation and propagation of American literature might be a threat to the regime. That same year, 1930, Pavese’s mother died, and apart from the period of ...”

“... But there is no denying that the results so far have sometimes been spectacular, as in the case of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms; or Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang, which described the adventures of a woman who ran away from her husband, returned to him, and was strangled by him as she slept one night in 1672 in a village in ...”

“... with wistful awe. Morante was writing at the height of Italian neorealism. In the early 1950s Carlo Cassola, Beppe Fenoglio, Vasco Pratolini, Morante’s husband, Alberto Moravia, and her friends Natalia Ginzburg and Pier Paolo Pasolini were all in different ways seeking to describe postwar desolation in ...”