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“... fact is indelible. In his chapter on memory and the Holocaust in The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi was at pains to stress that memory is unreliable, and that ‘even under normal conditions a slow degradation is at work, an obfuscation of outlines, a, so-to-speak, physiological oblivion, which few memories resist.’ But Sebald’s book shows ...”

“... may be killed and yet not sacrificed’ (already in the concentration camps witnessed by Primo Levi, the lowest of the low were called ‘Muselmann’). It is important to complicate, even to historicise, this picture of bare life, for otherwise it becomes not only too total in political terms but also too given in ontological terms. On this ...”

“... Italy. His 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 ...”

“... them). The only writer I know who makes chemistry intellectually exciting for the lay reader is Primo Levi, but, although he writes wonderfully about learning chemistry and the routine work of industrial analysis, he has no reason to describe the history of chemical innovation. Garfield tries analogies – he drops in a recipe for Nesselrode ...”

“... apart with machine-gun bullets, rounding up the survivors in camps fenced off with barbed wire.’Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz at the same time as Améry and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling ...”

“... Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, Lawrence Shainberg’s Brain Surgeon and ‘the works of Primo Levi, in particular If this is a man, The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved and Moments of Reprieve’. It is no longer acceptable, if it ever was, to regard journalists and other toilers in the seams of non-fiction as ‘day labourers who dig up slags ...”

“... the conflict has always been written about with a powerful sense of place – but how many places! Primo Levi’s Auschwitz, Günter Grass’s Danzig, Natalia Ginzburg’s divided Italy, Elizabeth Bowen’s London, Nicholas Monsarrat’s North Atlantic, Norman Mailer’s Pacific, Olivia Manning’s Balkans, John Hersey’s Hiroshima ... Among other ...”

“... futures’, in the best tradition of Italy’s two scientific literati, Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. Indeed, the links with Calvino are closer and more meaningful than Pollack probably realises, as I will argue later. First, let me get one complaint off my chest. The text suffers from a surfeit of fast-switching metaphors – no doubt with the ...”

“... athletics of Mary Meigs wearyingly dense, but that is possibly a reflex of age. Her assessment of Primo Levi and the impossibility of autobiography after the Nazi assault on language also is unpersuasive, especially in view of Levi’s superb critique and transcendence of it, and ‘crisis’, always a key identifier ...”

“... be ‘beyond criticism’, especially since some of these memoirs – most obviously those of Primo Levi – are so good. It isn’t clear how we are supposed to respond to these books: dutifully, as unimpeachable records of a catastrophe, or critically, as we might any other piece of writing. Reviewers tend to sidestep the problem by summarising ...”

“... or the mentally ill or homosexuals. The lack of context was deliberate. Citing a story told by Primo Levi in If This Is a Man, Lanzmann argued that attempting to understand the Holocaust was a form of ‘madness’, ‘an absolute obscenity’. Levi, desperately thirsty, grabbed an icicle and an SS officer took it ...”

“... addresses, with tact and restraint, the sufferings of those in Nazi concentration camps – Primo Levi is crucial here for Flynn. ‘The Butcher’ is a graphic tale of a mother who stabs her baby daughter in obedience, as she believes, to God’s command, His bloody instructions not rescinded at the last moment for her as they were for the ...”

“... Wheatcroft’s claim that the most difficult truth of all about it is its meaninglessness. Primo Levi points out that there was simply no point in subjecting one’s victims to cruelty and humiliation, dragging them on a senseless journey across Europe, when you were going to exterminate them anyway. Why not just kill them in their beds? If you ...”

“... became the basis for a broader social commitment to the notion of ‘never again’. (Primo Levi, who for years couldn’t get If This Is a Man published, saw it become the exemplary memoir and himself the iconic survivor.) Together, according to Fassin and Rechtman, the Holocaust and psychoanalysis created an epistemic rupture: a new regime ...”

“... to inform me.’ The Italian here is more emphatic, but also more fluent: ‘fu lui, mi sembra, il primo a informarmene’ – ‘it was him, I think, who first informed me.’ Goldstein also adds the explanatory ‘Arcturus’, not in the original, which breaks up the excitement of the metaphor ‘Arturo è una stella’ – ‘Arturo is a star’ – perhaps ...”