E-Books →Il Duce: The Life of Benito Mussolini

'No one understands him,' wrote Fernando Mezzasoma of Mussolini during the last week of both their lives. 'By turns shrewd and innocent, brutal and gentle, vindictive and forgiving, great and petty, he is the most complicated and contradictory man I have ever known. He cannot be explained.'

During the eighteen years between the March on Rome in 1922 and the outbreak of war in 1940, numerous books were written in an attempt to explain this extraordinary man; most of them were by Fascists or by expatriate Italians who had cause to hate Fascism. But not since his death has a full-length biography, taking advantage of the great mass of documentation which has come to light in the last sixteen years, been written in English.