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“... Giovanni Levi’s Inheriting Power bears a generic resemblance to those recent historical studies that illuminate the lives of European peasants by isolating and reconstructing a single resonant story. 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 ...”

“... On the September Friday that I arrived in Turin – to renew a conversation with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before – I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he’d been employed as a research chemist, and, afterwards, until retirement, as factory manager. Altogether the company employs 50 people, mainly chemists who work in the laboratories and skilled labourers on the floor of the plant ...”

“... angst’). In 1960, Dee succeeded in her campaign to get Freddie, marrying the ‘pear-shaped Don Giovanni’, as John Osborne, a rare Freddie dissenter, called him. By then he was Wykeham Professor of Logic, leaving for New College on Tuesdays and coming home on Fridays. Dee moved from the Express to the leftier Daily Herald, which suited her ...”

“... assembled a team of collaborators whose views were shaped by an evolving canon that included Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and, most significant of all, the work of Erving Goffman, which Ongaro translated for an Italian edition. In 1961, too, Goffman published ...”

“... great cage to put me in, for if you do not want me to be your beffana at the festival of San Giovanni, I can at least be a parrot to be shown in the window, or displayed on the piazza on Mardi Gras to amuse the children.’For Braudel, these stories capture Italy’s brilliance, but they are unreliable witnesses to its history: ‘How is one to set down ...”

“... as in the case of those designed by Schinkel for the picture gallery in Berlin, or by Giovanni Montiroli for the Cammuccini collection of Old Masters at Alnwick Castle, or by Stanford White for paintings by Abbot Thayer in the Freer Gallery in Washington. But the involvement of leading architects and sculptors declined: the public exhibition and ...”

“... to the spirit of his subject-matter. With the single-minded dedication of a Casanova or a Don Giovanni he records several hundred literary encounters of Dick and Fanny, Pego and Pussy, until exhaustiveness gives way to exhaustion. What is most strikingly absent is any sustained attempt at scholarly analysis of the material he presents in such ...”

“... literary sources range from formal treatises such as L’arte de cenni (1616) by the lawyer Giovanni Bonifacio or Andrea De Jorio’s La mimica degli antichi (1832)... to the more casual observations of foreign travellers like John Evelyn, who recorded at least one insulting gesture (biting the finger) which the two lexicographers missed. In the second ...”

“... to the Scuola Normale after the war. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Carlo Cipolla, Franco Modigliani and Giovanni Sartori took chairs in America. In the next levy, Carlo Ginzburg, Franco Moretti, Giovanni Arrighi all gave up posts at home, more or less in despair, to make their way across the Atlantic. This has never been a real ...”

“... short entries appear, one following the other: 11/21/49 Excellently staged performance of Don Giovanni last night (City Center). Today, a wonderful opportunity was offered me – to do some research work for a soc[iology] instructor named Philip Rieff, who is working on, among other things, a reader in the sociology of politics + religion. At last the ...”