Surely deeper differences remain?

Italian families have preserved a form of affiliation that is different from the forms of the British and the French and Germans. They have different ways of feeling-for example, the attitude toward whom you can invite home is totally different in Germany. I would never be invited to the homes of people I work with in Italy and France, whereas here in England there is a great deal of inviting people home if you are colleagues. There are all sorts of micro-environments that seem to hang on to their identity over much longer periods of time. So I think you have to observe many different structures to see which ones outlast these decades and which ones seem to collapse every five years.

One of the most interesting things that has happened since the Second World War is that the past has been ruptured forever. Dante felt himself to be continuous with the literature of his antecedents in a way that no modern writer does today. Europe threw up those great artists-Dante and Shakespeare, for example-over the course of about 400 or 500 years because Europe was a European community, which some naive observers think was inaugurated since the Second World War. The cultural giants were deeply European cosmopolitan figures. They saw themselves as being continuous with, and companions of, Virgil and Ovid. Shakespeare may have known little Latin and less Greek, but he felt himself to be a colleague and a contemporary in some way of Virgil's and Ovid's and Homer's