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“... In the context of modern culture ‘ordinary people’ are not seen as individuals but as representative embodiments of the right sort of social attitudes. Modernism also saw them in the mass, and disliked or ignored it: D.H. Lawrence, like Wyndham Lewis, made a principle out of such generalised contempt. As an ordinary person one would perhaps rather be despised by Modernism than recruited into the socialist pantheon, for there are at least two great writers, usually counted as Modernists, in whose work ordinariness achieves a highly individual and idiosyncratic literary status – James Joyce and Italo Svevo ...”

“... Here is a characteristic piece of comedy from the Book of Scottish Anecdote (seventh edition, 1888). A gentleman upbraids his servant: is it true, he asks him, that you have had the audacity to spread around the idea that your master is stingy? No, no, replies the servant, you won’t find me doing that kind of thing: ‘I aye keep my thoughts to mysel ...”

“... Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega, and becoming a bestseller in the US in Isabel Quigly’s 1959 translation. Now the book appears in a new translation by Ann Goldstein. Comparing their versions, one is struck by how differently two people can read the same text. Morante begins her story with Arturo remembering his childish ...”