Elsewhere he (Lampedusa) argued that history could not be understood properly without a knowledge of literature, especially minor literature. To find out what shopkeepers and railway workers were thinking in the 1920s, he remarked, there was not point reading the works of Giovanni Gentile. One had to read the books of second-rate novelists to have an authentic picture of an epoch, and although this might require patience, a strong stomach and a dose of bad taste, it was worth it. 'Ungrammatical, illogical, hysterical, ignorant, fatuous, "snobbish", in short pitiful as they are, they give us the true portrait of Demos, our lord and master. One has to read them.
D. Gilmour, The last leopard (1988, revised edition 2007), 46
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