Fascism
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
Was Mussolini’s wilful daughter his éminence grise?
In 1930, when she was 19 years old, Edda Mussolini married Galeazzo Ciano. His father was a loyal minister in…
What does it mean when Giorgia Meloni quotes G.K. Chesterton?
Is it fascist or anti-fascist to quote G.K. Chesterton, or neither?
Pre-Mussolini, most Italians couldn’t understand each other
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…
Fascist, anti-Semite and dupe: the dark side of G.K. Chesterton
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…
The forgotten victims of communism
I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He…
From ‘divine Caesar’ to Hitler’s lapdog – the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini
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
It’s still impossible for Horst Wächter to recognise his father as a Nazi war criminal
In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new…
Britain can be as prone to fascism as any other nation
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…
Franco’s bloody finale
One afternoon in the early 1990s, an elderly gentleman from Alicante told me of the tragedy that had occurred at…
David Bowie once praised Hitler… but he was always changing his tune
I was desperately worried that you hadn’t read or heard enough platitudinous drivel about David Bowie — and therefore felt…
What happened to British communism?
Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor,…
What drove Europe into two world wars?
Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and…
The constant inconstancy that made Italians yearn for fascism
Jan Morris on the inconsistency and paradox that has characterised Italian thought over the centuries — and the desperate search for certainty
How dedicated a fascist was Le Corbusier?
The ‘revelations’, 50 years after he drowned, that Le Corbusier was a ‘fascist’ and an anti-Semite are neither fresh nor…
Ezra Pound – the fascist years
‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,…
