Volume 52, Number 6 · April 7, 2005
The Illusionist
By Tim Parks
Mussolini: A New Life
by Nicholas Farrell
Phoenix, 560 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Mussolini
by R.J.B. Bosworth
London: Arnold, 584 pp., $16.95 (paper; distributed in the US by Oxford University Press)
On the Fiery March: Mussolini Prepares for War
by G. Bruce Strang
Praeger, 375 pp., $49.95
From the three great architects of the Italian Risorgimento in the mid-nineteenth century—Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour—to the rule of Mussolini from 1922 to 1943, it would be hard to find a single figure in Italian politics whose biography is in print in English today, this despite the country's colonial expansion in Libya and then participation in World War I. A fluid parliamentary system of shifting alliances between fragmenting parties largely in thrall to the whims of an interfering and mediocre monarchy meant that those who held power did so only through continual compromise and ad hoc administration. Much the same, minus the monarchy, could be said of Italian leaders since the Second World War, at least until Berlusconi. Biographers find it difficult to have such men emerge from an elusive and very Italian context.
Review, 5034 words
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