At a book fair, one should be asking for something else. A commitment to doing away with pointless debates, for example. That stale, yawn-inducing rhetoric: any genuine book lover would like to blast it away with a flamethrower

What happens when an intellectual class systematically forces the society that hosts it – including other intellectuals – to deal with serious matters in a foolish way, or with foolish matters in a pedantic way? This is the situation in Italy

Manuel Grillo has not signed the anti-fascism clause required by the AIE to take part in the Rome book fair. This is not a departure from the Constitution, he says, but a conviction that respecting it is sufficient to participate legitimately. His catalogue also stands in his defence: from Rebatet to Weiss

A book fair should be a place of complexity, of difficult and controversial ideas; otherwise, it is reduced to a sort of sugar-coated Disney-style world of the supposedly ‘good’ who pat each other on the back, getting all excited about the correctness of their own positions