Letter
What We Call Human
15 June 2023
James Butler quotes Italo Calvino from a lecture in 1976: ‘What we ask of writers is that they guarantee the survival of what we call human’ (LRB, 15 June). I met Calvino once, at Musica nel Chiostro, the summer opera festival at Batignano in Tuscany. We discussed Stephen Oliver’s opera Beauty and the Beast. Calvino looked at me with a doleful smile and said: ‘Noi siamo tutti bestie.’...
