Richard J. Evans writes:

In his magnificent new book, a pathbreaking study that everyone interested in Fascism, or in Italy past and present, should read, Christopher Duggan fills the gap by examining a wide range of diaries, including Petacci’s, and the numerous letters sent to Mussolini by private citizens during the two decades of his rule, which often express the same intimate feelings towards the Duce and his regime as the messages left in recent times on his grave. This enables Duggan to deliver not merely a detailed account of popular attitudes towards the regime, but, far more, a general history of Fascism that for the first time treats it, not as a tyranny that allowed ordinary Italians no possibility of expressing themselves freely, nor as the brutal dictatorship of a capitalist class that reduced the great majority of the country’s citizens to the status of victims, but as a regime rooted strongly in popular aspirations and desires.

(LRB 21 February 2013)

The Bodley Head Ltd | Hardback 528 pp. |ISBN: 9781847921031