“You’ve got politicians in power or vying for power who are taking tactics and elements of their appeal from the playbook of fascism.”

All over Budapest, statues have been replaced, museum exhibits have been redone, to turn ethnic Hungarians, not Jews, into the prime victims of the Germans during World War II.

In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist of two hundred years ago

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.