By its very nature, politics is constituted of:

Concept — a detail question on a passage is settled by what the passage itself predicates of the exact subject the stem names, never by what a reader independently believes about that subject. The working method is keyword anchoring: carry the stem's distinctive wording back into the passage, locate the sentence that makes a statement about that subject, and read that sentence's predicate.

Application — apply the anchoring method to this stem:

1. Fix the stem's subject and its qualifier: what politics is constituted of "by its nature".

2. Carry that qualifier back into the passage. The passage states: "Another reason why politics does not seem amenable to the highest kind of literary representation seems to arise from the fact that politics by its very nature is constituted of ideas and ideologies."

3. Read the predicate of that sentence. What politics is constituted of, by its very nature, is ideas and ideologies.

Cross-check — the remaining phrases of the option set all correspond to material in the passage, but each is predicated of a different subject:

• Prevalent political situation: the passage says political situations "do not lend themselves to happy literary treatment" — a difficulty of literary treatment, not a statement of what politics is made of.

• Political propaganda: the passage calls a novel propaganda when it "seeks to convert and enlist the reader to a particular cause or ideology" — a description of a kind of writing.

• Understanding of human nature: "human experiences", "human flesh and blood" and the broadening of "the range of our sympathies" are what the passage assigns to literature, expressly opposed to the "intellectual abstractions" of politics.

Hence, by its very nature, politics is constituted of ideas and ideologies.