Author Description

'No one understands him,' wrote Fernando Mezzasoma of Mussolini during the last week of both their lives.Drawing on Italian sources and contemporary accounts, Christopher Hibbert's classic biography emphasizes the contradictions of a man who was both the idolized demi-god of the Italian people and the monstrous buffoon of wartime propaganda: a ma who was, by turns, brutal and kind, vindictive and forgiving, petty and magnanimous. The book describes his poverty-stricken youth, his astronomic rise to power his political machinations, his invasion of Abyssinia (despite opposition from the League of Nations) and his final, fateful drift into alliance with Hitler.