John Foot and Stephen Gundle have done an important service to the historical profession and to the memory of Paul Ginsborg – who died in 2022 at the age of 76 – by collecting and editing the essays and interviews that make up this tribute to a historian whom they rightly call ‘the most influential British historian of Italy of his generation’ (p. 1).

Foot and Gundle’s introduction to the book highlights Ginsborg’s main contributions to historiography as well as his roles as a teacher, a public intellectual, and a political activist both in the UK and in Italy, where he moved permanently to teach at the University of Florence in the 1990s, after several years as a professor at Cambridge and other English and Italian universities. Following the introduction, an essay by Marcello Flores discusses the critical reception of Ginsborg’s History of Contemporary Italy, first published in Italian in 1989, the first text by a major historian to offer an overall history of the Republic and to reach a large audience with its accessible and engaging prose. The volume was followed by another major study, published in 1998, L’Italia del tempo presente (translated into English as Italy and Its Discontents in 2001) which covered the period 1980–1996, documenting in detail the transformations of the economy, the society, and politics in those fateful 15 years which saw not only the development of a more affluent society, but also the crisis and final collapse of the whole party system that had been in place since the establishment of the Republic. The close attention to the behaviour of social groups and to the role of the family in Italian society, and the emphasis on the weakness of reform projects and the frequent failure of leftist strategies are defining traits of Ginsborg’s analysis and often generated strong criticisms as they dealt with issues at the centre of current political and sociological debates. This comes up clearly in the round table devoted to this volume and originally published in 2000 (and here reproduced with unfortunately sloppy editing), where Perry Anderson, Simon Parker, and John Foot question some of Ginsborg’s evaluations concerning the Italian middle classes and trends in civil society, a notion that Anderson in particular finds in need of clarification.

In between and following these pieces are several essays by former students and/or fellow Italianists from the UK and Italy which are either inspired by or connected to different aspects of Ginsborg’s work. Some of them deal with aspects of Risorgimento Italy (the article by Elena Bacchin on the prison memoirs of a nineteenth-century patriot, and Piero Brunello’s piece on the 1848 revolution in Venice), but most refer to aspects of the more recent history of Italy (Barbara Montesi’s piece on children as consumers in the twentieth century, Alberto Mario Banti’s on the relationship between the new left and popular music, Giovanni Contini’s on Resistance novels versus histories, Philip Cooke’s on the visual memory of the Resistance in Florence, Stephen Gundle’s on the memory of and nostalgia for the leader of the Italian Communist Party Enrico Berlinguer, John Foot’s on the issue of ‘the personal is political’ in the radical psychiatry movement). An essay by John Dickie criticises Ginsborg’s excessive reliance on Diego Gambetta’s interpretation of the nature and origin of the Sicilian mafia, which Dickie finds quite questionable on various grounds and which he discusses extensively in light of the more recent historiography. As in all collections of this kind, the essays exhibit somewhat different levels of significance in relation to the work of the historian to whom the book is dedicated, but they are all quite informative.

The editors of the volume had the excellent idea of including a mostly unpublished interview with Ginsborg carried out in Cambridge in 1984. Here Ginsborg’s engaging self, his family background, his radicalisation in 1968 at the time of the Vietnam war, his encounter with the Italian new left of the 1970s, and his thoughts on politics more generally come to the fore in a vivid personal account. The retelling of his experiences as a young man, embracing a leftist political stance in contrast to the conservatism and conformism of his London Jewish family, is also very fetching, especially when Ginsborg recalls the feeling of empowerment and excitement that he experienced when he joined a great antiwar demonstration in London: ‘It was one of the most wonderful moments of my life because I had never been on a demonstration and to feel that collective power I thought was just fantastic’ (p. 271). His criticisms of certain habits of the Italian new left (particularly the very long speeches of some of its leaders), and what he aptly calls ‘its ideological blocking points’ and sectarianism are spot on.

Ginsborg’s understanding of the importance of political engagement and collective action never abandoned him and led him to be one of the organisers in the early 2000s of the Italian grassroots movement – known as girotondi – against the corrupt policies of the Berlusconi government. As Foot and Gundle also observe in their introduction, Ginsborg’s concern for the state of democracy in Italy under the rule of the magnate was the origin of the volume he published on Berlusconi in 2003 (reprinted with a new postscript in 2005): an admirably lucid and succinct analysis of the roots and nature of a new power system based on a vast control of the media that virtually nullifies the principles of liberal democracy – an issue unfortunately of continuing great relevance, and not only in Italy.

Regarding Ginsborg as teacher of history, a piece by Enrica Asquer, a former student, now professor at the University of Genoa, recalls how his teaching style and theoretically informed approach to the study of the past inspired his students. The volume ends with a bibliography of Ginsborg’s works by Stuart Oglethorpe. A final note of gratitude to the editors for having included a wonderful photograph of Ginsborg at Churchill College, Cambridge, circa 1980. It beautifully conveys the penetrating intelligence and the intense humanity of this distinguished historian of modern Italy.