Mussolini was an activist and, in his own mind, a purist one, who deservedly bore the names of Cipriani and the young Costa. In his poetry, he chante… - 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 personage against whom to measure the very many tyrants who dominated so many countries in Europe between the wars and, in the developing world, then and thereafter. In more complex parallel, Mussolini also bore some comparison with Stalin and his later epigones in Eastern Europe, who, in apparent oxymoron ruled as national communists.

[Mussolini’s] most ambitious article for La Lima was a lengthy review of Marx on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. Here Mussolini celebrated the father of socialism as an activist, as one who was simultaneously ‘scientific’ and realistic. Marx, he wrote with fervour, had demonstrated conclusively that ‘a class will never give up its privileges unless it is forced to do so.’ He had proven without a doubt that ‘the final struggle will be violence and “catastrophic’” because capitalists would certainly not surrender without a bitter fight.

In 1919 a nationalist general concluded bitterly that, when confronted by the ‘test of war’, Italy had demonstrated that ‘no one governed it.’