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“... Il Figlio dell’Uomo’, ‘The Son of Man’, an essay by Natalia Ginzburg written in 1946 for the paper Unita, begins: ‘There has been a war and people have seen so many houses reduced to rubble that they no longer feel safe in their own homes which once seemed so quiet and secure. This is something that is incurable and will never be cured no matter how many years go by ...”

“... traumatic, perhaps fatal break. This may seem a strange preamble to a consideration of the work of Natalia Ginzburg, a writer sometimes criticised in Italy for having restricted her comments on the highly influential, privileged and politicised peer group she lived among to accounts of their domestic foibles. But coming back to ...”

“... that have an interest for other reasons: those of a 22-year-old Giorgio Agamben, of the novelist Natalia Ginzburg, or Pasolini’s own mother – as Mary grown older. The talk itself in the movie – that is, all the intense verbatim quotation of Christ’s words – works as long as we can maintain the disconnect in our minds between this language and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was the most prestigious publishing house in the country (Pavese, Calvino, Vittorini, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, not to mention Gramsci), and, for a couple of decades after the war, probably the finest in the world. He would take (under-royaltied) authors like me to dinner at the opulent Cambio restaurant, unchanged since Cavour had planned the ...”

“... to its literature. Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Martha Gellhorn, Natalia Ginzburg, Shirley Hazzard, Doris Lessing and many other women writers are here (but not Anne Frank or Hannah Arendt), and among the more unexpected selections are the reminiscences of Soviet women, collected, Studs Terkel-wise, by Julia ...”

“... are​ antecedents for books like this in Italian literature: collections of short pieces by Natalia Ginzburg or Italo Calvino – or Cesare Pavese’s Among Women Only, another novel in which a cool protagonist is both drawn to and repulsed by the intensity of sexual relationships. But the complete immersion in Italian culture evident in ...”

“... 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 spare, chastened prose. Morante was having none of it. Her own writing is more reminiscent of the fin-de-siècle grandiloquence of D’Annunzio. And ...”

“... by Jesus. This woman has long been identified as Mary of Bethany (Pasolini brilliantly cast Natalia Ginzburg as Mary of Bethany in his Gospel According to St Matthew: she smiles broadly as she lavishes the oil on his hair). She sits at Jesus’s feet to listen to his words, while her sister, Martha, prepares the meal. When Martha remonstrates with ...”

“... production: it came after four years in which Calvino had published nothing, and he suggested to Natalia Ginzburg that it ‘only offered news about my silence’. But he didn’t, in the end, produce a novel of anathemas so much as a ‘book of question marks’, in which the crisis is seen as too general and too pressing to concern only one party. It ...”

“... close them again in 1940), and since Weil excelled in the entrance exams, they had to let her in.Natalia Ilyinichna Tcherniak was born to Jewish parents on 18 July 1900 in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in Russia. Her father, Israel (Ilya) Tcherniak, had built up a factory producing industrial dyes. Her mother, Khina Perl (Polina) Chatounovskaya, was – or rather ...”

“... on earth, but also the most boring!’ was the verdict of Hannah Arendt in 1952; ten years later Natalia Ginzburg, visiting London, would have agreed: ‘England is never vulgar. It is conventional, but not vulgar … the English rarely surprise.’ The class system had much to do with the stolidity of the British in the 1950s, though whether that ...”

“... which featured the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as the disciple Philip, the novelist Natalia Ginzburg as Mary of Bethany and Susanna, Pasolini’s mother, as the older Virgin Mary. A few years later, Pasolini wrote warmly about Morante’s Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (1968), a dramatic poetry cycle which has just been translated into ...”

“... the disease and those placed higher up did not.) Levi’s literary career had a shaky start – Natalia Ginzburg rejected his first book for Einaudi, not quite on a par with Gide’s rejection of Proust, but still embarrassing – and it didn’t take off until The Truce in 1963. (The Italian edition sold forty thousand copies within a month and might ...”