“Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.”

Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well.

Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?

Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings

Many of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain

I can certainly sympathize with writers who don’t want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.

So people at the time really saw fascism not just as an evil but as an aggressive evil that seemed to be spreading.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

You can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.

Because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.

How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

Its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game.

To bring us this vivid, searing account of the wide network of human trafficking and servitude which spans today’s globe.

I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man.