R. J. B. Bosworth

With Mussolini 's Italy, R.J.B. Bosworth—the foremost scholar on the subject writing in English—vividly brings to life the period in which Italians participated in one of the twentieth century's most notorious political experiments. Il Duce's Fascists were the original totalitarians, espousing a cult of violence and obedience that inspired many other dictatorships, Hitler's first among them. But as Bosworth reveals, many Italians resisted its ideology, finding ways, ingenious and varied, to keep Fascism from taking hold as deeply as it did in Germany. A sweeping chronicle of struggle in terrible times, this is the definitive account of Italy's darkest hour.

Richard Bosworth's overview of Italy's role in European and world politics from 1860 to 1960 is lively and iconclastic. Based on a combination of primary research and secondary material he examines Italian diplomacy, military power, commerce, culture, tourism and ideology. His account challenges many aspects of current Italian historiography and offers an original vision of the place of Italy in modern history.

Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima explores the way in which the main combatant societies of the Second World War have historicised that experience. Since 1945, debates in Germany about `the past that would not fade away' have been reasonably well-known. But in this book, Richard Bosworth maintains that Germany is not unique. He argues that in Britain, France, Italy, the USSR and Japan, as well as in Germany the traumatic history of the `long Second World War' has remained crucial to the culture and the politics of post-war societies. Each has felt a compelling need to interpret this past event and thus to `explain' `Auschwitz' and `Hiroshima'. Bosworth explores the bitter controversies that have developed around a particular interpretation of the war, such as disputes over A.J.P. Taylor's, Origins of the Second World War, Marcel Ophul's film, The Sorrow and the Pity, Renzo De Felice's biography of Mussolini in the 1970s or in post-Glasnost debates about the historiographies of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Richard Bosworth's book is a wide-ranging and thoughtful excursion into comparative history.

"This important new life of Mussolini by a talented new biographer draws on a vast range of fresh material to challenge the standard version of Italy's fascist dictator as either grotesque buffoon, hell bent on war in Europe (the liberal version), or tool of the bourgeoisie in its war with the working class (the Marxist version)." "To get power and hold it by and large bloodlessly through two decades, as Mussolini did until his disastrous alliance with Hitler, required much more than that. Such was the magnetism of the man Churchill called 'the Roman genius' and Pope Pius XI 'sent by Providence', and so strong the appeal of fascism, that the only honest verdict is that he ruled by popular demand." "Mussolini was as popular with women as men. Behind every great man, it is said, there is a woman. Behind this great dictator, who had 169 lovers according to one estimate, stood a nation of women. It was his politics they found most attractive. He did away with democracy but he did not use mass murder to stay in power. There was no need. To the bitter end, there was little resistance to him by Italians because support for him remained so strong." "His fatal error was his alliance with Hitler whom he despised. But this alliance was far from inevitable, the result more of Anglo-French incompetence and his fear of Hitler than a wild desire for war or 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." "This new biography also forces us to wonder whether Mussolini - a revolutionary Socialist who founded Fascism as an alternative left-wing revolutionary movement - had better vision than Marx. For whereas Communism appears terminally ill, Fascism's Third Way between Capitalism and Communism lives on, championed by standard bearers of the modern left such as New Labour." "To assume that Fascism was a phenomenon of the extreme right is to miss the point: Mussolini despised the bourgeois way of life - la vita comoda - above all else and he remained at heart a Socialist to his dying day."--BOOK JACKET.

"In this elegant book Richard Bosworth explores Venice--not the glorious Venice of the Venetian Republic, but from the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Risorgimento up through the present day. Bosworth looks at the glamour and squalor of the belle époque and the dark underbelly of modernization, the two world wars, and the far-reaching oppressions of the fascist regime, through to the 'Disneylandification' of Venice and the tourist boom, the worldwide attention of the biennale and film festival, and current threats of subsidence and flooding posed by global warming. He draws out major themes--the increasingly anachronistic but deeply embedded Catholic Church, the two faces of modernization, consumerism versus culture. Bosworth interrogates not just Venice's history but its meanings, and how the city's past has been co-opted to suit present and sometimes ulterior aims. Venice, he shows, is a city where its histories as well as its waters ripple on the surface"--

Bringing together scholars, especially young ones, from the Italian- and English-speaking world, Bosworth and Dogliani's edited book reviews the history of the memory and representation of Fascism after 1945. Among the matters discussed are monumental representations of Fascism and war (official and unofficial, Italian and 'Slav'), the memories of such traumatic times that are held by peasants, women, volunteer emigrants to Nazi Germany, Dodecanese islanders and any who retained a mentality affected by the dictatorship, as well as cinematic and film accounts of the Fascist past. With its attention ranging from patriotism to sadomasochism, the book asks important questions about the way in which Italians have remembered and forgotten their history under Mussolini and is therefore of interest to any who wonder about how a past becomes usable and why such usability is most often short-term and precarious.