Carlo Ginzburg and I arrived at ucla at the same time in 1988, but without either of us, so far as I remember, being aware of the other; he taking up the chair of Italian Renaissance studies in the History department—over eighty strong at the time—I as a visiting lecturer. We met the following year after I joined the department, and introducing himself he welcomed me warmly. I knew Carlo by reputation only, he of me perhaps via association at one remove with History Workshop, the journal where in 1980 he had published ‘Clues’, the most influential of all his many essays. I soon discovered that while poles apart in outlook and character, we had more in common than I expected, and became fast friends. What divided us were our areas of prior concern. The work that had made Carlo famous as a historian, though by no means exhausting his range, was a highly original anthropology of the past, casting new light on the lives of the forgotten or oppressed. My writing had lain at the opposite extreme, looking at macro-structures of power and those who ruled through them. To all appearances, each of us had little sensibility for the enquiries of the other. To my surprise, however, in due course it became clear that there was one field where our interests coincided, though not our methods of pursuing them. That was the realm of ideas—roughly speaking, intellectual history.

There was also a kind of contact when it came to questions that were contemporary. In age we were separated by less than a year. From early childhood my temperament was instinctively political; by the time I encountered Carlo I’d edited or contributed to New Left Review for close to all my adult life. He had no such natural affinity for politics. But he was the son of Leone Ginzburg, born to Russian Jewish parents in Odessa, a leading figure of the Italian Resistance, tortured and killed by the Nazis in 1944. It was impossible for him to be unpolitical in the ordinary Atlantic way. The post-war Italy in which he was formed was in any case the most intensely politicized society in Western Europe. Though as averse to the rote flourishes of latter-day anti-fascism in the country as to any other established rhetoric, his natural milieu was the rebellious left of his own generation, among whom a good few of his closest friends at home could be numbered. On my side, there was a link to this that set me apart from the rest of the department: long interest in and engagement with the political and intellectual landscape of the Italian left. I’d just published a piece on Norberto Bobbio,footnote1 the country’s leading political philosopher of the period, a socialist featuring in Carlo’s family background in Turin who had been a close friend of his father and became his principal interpreter and memorialist after the war.footnote2 There was also, of course, the experience we shared of newcomers living mostly in Los Angeles for the first time.

Back in Europe at the end of my first year at ucla, I received the new book Carlo had just published, Storia notturna. After reading it with considerable fascination and excitement, and some reading around it, I decided to write about it. The result, published in the London Review of Books in the autumn of 1990, was an admiring, if also critical assessment of it, relating the book to the principal works of Carlo that had preceded it. The differences in our forms of intellectual history were one of the reasons for my reservations. These were twofold. The range of texts which Carlo could canvas was vastly larger than mine, extending from classical and biblical to patristic and mediaeval sources, Renaissance to Enlightenment to Victorian times: his erudition was unrivalled. My knowledge was much more limited and selective, not going much further back than the seventeenth century. At the same time, Carlo’s method of handling the sources he wrote about, derived from Auerbach and Spitzer, was extractive: taking a few passages from a body of writing, typically though not invariably linking these to passages from another writer, without setting either in the fuller context of their work. Mine was the opposite: considering, so far as I could, the corpus of a thinker as a whole, and setting it in the biographical and socio-political context of the time out of which it came. I applied this approach to Carlo with some misgivings, fearing that he might take it amiss. But he didn’t, responding with brio in the pages of the paper at some length, to which I replied in a similar spirit.footnote3 The exchange strengthened the bonds between us, rather than weakening them.

At ucla we taught a couple of subjects together, the first with a seminar on relativism, the second a session on postmodernism, later a discussion with students on problems of philology; and corresponded when we were back in Europe. At the end of the decade, when I was preparing the relaunch of nlr into a new format, I sent Carlo—among about a dozen colleagues and friends—a couple of initial drafts of what would become the editorial in the first number of the new series of the journal, ‘Renewals’, asking for their comments. His response was the most bracingly critical of the set, to which I replied. The exchange between us forms the first item in the correspondence printed below, dating from the summer of 1999. Soon afterwards, nato’s attack on Yugoslavia became the occasion for a second exchange, after I sent Carlo a short text on it with which he strongly disagreed, written for an outlet on the left in Italy.

In 2000 I was on sabbatical, as the new series of the journal came into being. The following year saw two further exchanges between us, this time initiated by Carlo rather than myself. Responding to a draft I’d written about Sebastiano Timpanaro after he died, Carlo corrected me on a number of points and raised others—suggesting a different view of his materialism, as to his credit deliberately pre- or anti-Marxist rather than Marxist: a view from which I demurred. Both of us had known Sebastiano, and this didn’t tally with my understanding of him. Then in September 2001 when the Second Intifada broke out in Palestine, I wrote an editorial in nlr on the origins and evolution of Israel which produced the stormiest reaction from Carlo to anything I ever wrote. I gave no ground in replying, in a counter-attack taking him to task for a response I judged unbalanced and inaccurate. The violence of the exchange affected our relations only in one way. We never touched on Israel again. A year later, we were corresponding about Italian politics and society in the same tones as we had always talked about them, expressing our respective views of the phenomenon of Berlusconi; then about France, and the figures of Churchill and De Gaulle. The selection of exchanges in this issue of nlr ends at the dawn of 2007 with a message from Carlo about myself and Edward Thompson that came as a surprise to me, giving him in return my own sense of it.

Twenty years later, how far are these exchanges of interest? As indications of the character and outlook of the most original historian of his time, they are of undeniable value. But Carlo had many much older and deeper friends in Italy, and more than a few elsewhere, with whom he will have corresponded more frequently and freely. The wider significance of these exchanges lies perhaps simply in the kind of intellectual dialogue they suggest, which may be less common among scholars than it should be: but who can be sure of that? What is certain is that in the course of the relationship it was I who learnt most from it. Carlo was wonderful company. He had a terribilità capable, without hostility, of intimidating students or colleagues, and his judgements could be peremptory; but as the finest interview of the many he gave makes plain, he was also habitually self-questioning and deliberately self-altering, away from his own successes.footnote4 The keynotes of his presence were mordant good humour and blunt candour, a lively curiosity and sense of adventure. He always seemed to be on the move, criss-crossing countries and continents, speaking at lecterns or in streets. It was one of the most striking paradoxes of his being. No scholar of his generation commanded a more abstruse erudition—sales of his collected essays could be quite modest. Yet none commanded a wider audience, not simply because of the fame of The Cheese and the Worms, but because of a passion to communicate that lay behind the clarity and purity of his diction as a writer, no matter how recondite his subject.footnote5 He was the opposite of reclusive. The exchanges below give only a glimpse of the breadth of his mind, since virtually all the material in them is more or less political in nature. In the next issue of the journal, the complexion of subsequent passages between us will alter.