Mussolini: A New Life [Hardcover]

We are setting a press date of 30 June for this title due to serialisation. Serial has now run with the first four-part extract in the 1 June edition of the MAIL ON SUNDAY: MUSSOLINI THE MAN WHO SEDUCED A NATION the headline shouted! A second extract also ran in IRELAND ON SUNDAY Press interest is strong, we are expecting reviews in all national papers though sadly we lost the NIGHTWAVES BBC RADIO 3 interview as the author is overseas. THE JEWISH CHRONICLE has also asked the author to write an article on how Mussolini was more of a friend to the Jews. And he has also written a double page spread for THE INDEPENDENT on Blair: the new Mussolini. I am also talking to the EXPRESS about apiece on the Daily Mail, Mussolini and Oswald Mosley. And another piece by afriend of the author on Mussolini and the Jews has also run in THE SPECTATOR. We are now receiving our first reviews: "A revisionist history which is notentirely without merit." INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY "A highly spirited and ratherremarkable book"ANDREW ROBERTS, DAILY TELEGRAPH "A new and substantial biogra

A rigorously researched new life of Mussolini by a talented new biographer sets the record straight on one of the most important figures of the modern age. This major biography of Mussolini draws on a vast range of fresh research to challenge the standard versions of Italy's fascist dictator as either grotesque buffoon (liberal) or bourgeois stooge (marxist). How did Mussolini, a brilliant journalist, charismatic orator, and revolutionary socialist who founded fascism as an alternative left wing revolutionary movement, gain power? And how, through two decades did he hold it, by and large bloodlessly, until his disastrous alliance with Hitler, whom he despised? Nicholas Farrell, who has studied Mussolini for close on a decade, shows how the alliance with Hitler was far from inevitable, the result more of British snobbery and incompetence and Mussolini's fear of Germany, than any wild desire on his part for world domination, let alone the extermination of the Jews. Indeed, once the holocaust had begun, he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives. Although Mussolini did away with democracy, he did not use mass murder to stay in power. Support for him in Italy was such, Farrell argues, that the only honest verdict, however unpalatable, must be that he ruled with the consent of the Italian people. Farrell identifies the key ingredients of this consent as the spiritual appeal of fascism which made it a civic religion and the magnetism of Mussolini and his ideas which made him the most admired politician in the world for much of the inter-war period Described by Churchill as 'the Roman genius', and Pope Pius XI as 'sent by Providence' to save Italy, Mussolini also, according to best estimates, had 169 extra-marital love affairs. Whatever the post-war myth would have us believe about a heroic resistance to Mussolini from inside Italy, the truth, as Farrell shows, is that the role of the resistance was marginal to the very end because support for him was so strong. This new biography also forces us to wonder whether Mussolini had better vision than Marx. For whereas today communist economic ideas are terminally ill the fascist idea of the third way between capitalism and communism lives on championed by the modern left such as New Labour. To assume that fascism was a phenomenon of the extreme right is to deny Mussolini's vision: he despised the bourgeois way of life - 'la vita comoda' - above all else and remained at heart a socialist to his dying day. Illustrated 20 in UK only [no author photo] Nicholas Farrell read history at Cambridge University and spent two years teaching English in Italy before entering journalism. He was on the staff of the Sunday Telegraph (and briefly the Daily Telegraph) for nearly ten years, specialising in news features, often overseas, particularly to Italy. He quit the Telegraph in March 1996 to write books, but still contributes to the press, in particular to the Spectator. His interest in Mussolini was enhanced by his discovery in 1994 of five volumes of diaries believed by experts to be his. Farrell, who speaks and reads Italian fluently, has since the summer of 1998 lived in the Apennine village of Predappio in the Romagna where Mussolini was born and is buried like a saint. Weidenfeld & Nicolson The Orion Publishing Group Orion House 5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane London, WC2H 9EA Cover photograph: Hulton Getty Cover design by Jamie Tanner