“... The best of these microhistories – Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre – succeed in making their stories what Kenneth Burke calls ‘representative anecdotes’, reflections of reality that are inevitably selections of reality. The selections work if they manage to convey a sense of both ...”

“... preferred being attractive in the depraved modern way, like Dietrich and Garbo, or maybe Bette Davis, and dressing, like the rest of the modern world, in imitation of Paris. Folk-dress invoked notions of national purity, meaning no make-up and no permanent waves, no smoking and no cocktails. Some eager Nazi supporters went in for it, but only the very ...”