R.J.B. Bosworth

"As I explore Mussolini’s personality, his power, its effects and its limitations, I became convinced that the Duce was not just the first modern dictator but also, far better than Hitler, the personag…"

"Syndicalist A.O. Olivetti maintained, the Fascist state had invented the economic system surpassing both socialism and liberalism. Its first clause ran: ‘the Italian nation is an organism having a pur…"

"Whereas Hitler believed fundamentally and literally in racist science, Mussolini might often sound hard-line, and certainly regularly spoke up for murder. Yet, equally, he remained capable of skeptici…"

"Whereas once the movement had flirted with feminism, now Mussolini required that female organizations focus on charity, ‘to the exclusion of any political action which must be left exclusively to the …"

"When the national transport system was tested a few years later by the Second World War, the Fascist railways showed little advance on the Liberal ones and the transport of goods, especially south of …"

"Fascism, with its habitual use of the language of aggression—not for nothing did Mussolini regularly rejoice in his own savagery, seeing himself as a cat who walked by itself at night ready to scratch…"

"In 1914, by almost every index, Italy was the least of the great powers. Nor, despite huffing and puffing about imperial conquest and racial prowess, would that ranking be much altered during the Fasc…"

"In 1918 had coined the slogan: ‘the man who never changes his mind… is a blockhead’… None the less, this early Fascism did often sound radical, even ‘socialist’, in everything except its foreign polic…"