Fascism
Marvellously conservative: Cable Street reviewed
Cable Street is a musical that premièred last year at the Southwark Playhouse and has now migrated to the Marylebone…
The key to Giorgia Meloni’s resounding success
The once sullen, bullied girl, abandoned by her father as a baby, found iron in her soul and refused to become a victim
Jonathan Bowden: my eccentric school friend who became a far-right hero
When my old school, Presentation College, Reading, was demolished a decade ago, the Labour council desperately searched for famous old…
What do we mean when we talk about freedom?
When the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder was 14, his parents took him to Costa Rica, a country…
Nietzsche’s thinking seems destined to be mangled and misunderstood
Two Italian editors, determined to rescue the philosopher from Nazi associations, find their concern with philological truth derided by French postmodernists
Four dangerous visionary writers
Simon Ings examines the lives of Maxim Gorky, Maurice Barrès, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ding Ling, whose propagandism helped shape – and misshape – the 20th century
‘As capricious as a wild mare’
In 1930, when she was 19 years old, Edda Mussolini married Galeazzo Ciano. His father was a loyal minister in…
The prince of paradox
Is it fascist or anti-fascist to quote G.K. Chesterton, or neither?
A multiplicity of Italys
Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there…
Was the US involved in neo-fascist Italian terrorism?
Last month, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi promised to declassify government documents involving two organisations: Gladio, an anti-communist paramilitary group…
No saintly innocent
The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this…
Spain’s growing culture war over General Franco
There are hundreds of mass graves dotted around the Spanish countryside. In roadside ditches, down hillside gullies, dumped in pits…
Fascism: the most abused term in America
A well-dressed young man walks down the Potsdamer Straße in Berlin, days before the end of March in 1933. He’s…
High life
I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He…
A tinpot Caesar
Mussolini dreamed of a new Roman empire and dominion over the Mediterranean. Two decades later he was hanging by his feet in a public square, as Ian Thomson relates
Nazi on the run
In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new…
The enemy within
It’s easy to dismiss the fascistic ideologues who populate Graham Macklin’s book as reactionary cranks of no significance. It’s also…
The sinister strains of English folk music
With public life increasingly a din of personalised ringtones and phone chatter, we crave silence. Acoustic ecologists speak of ‘ear…
Where is the rise of neo-Nazism around Europe leading?
‘Why would anyone write a historical study of it?’ asks Gavriel Rosenfeld about the Fourth Reich at the start of…
Caught between fascism and witchcraft: All Among the Barley, by Melissa Harrison, reviewed
All Among the Barley, Melissa Harrison’s third ‘nature novel’, centres on Wych Farm in the autumn of 1933, where the…
Fascism isn’t rising, but bien-pensant hysteria certainly is
Benito lives! The Blackshirts are here. Fascism is on the march — at least according to Madeleine Albright, secretary of…
Enrico Fermi: nuclear physicist and childish practical joker
Enrico Fermi may not be a name as familiar as Einstein, Feynman or Hawking, but he was one of the…
The infamous four
Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy…
One of history’s saddest chapters
One afternoon in the early 1990s, an elderly gentleman from Alicante told me of the tragedy that had occurred at…
Has the term ‘racist’ become devalued through overuse?
Adam Rutherford 4 January 2025 9:00 am
Quite possibly. But racism remains all too real today – even though half the British population deny it exists