Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> It does not really take a nudge from Jacques Derrida to realise that the relationship between authors and their texts is a wry one. Certainly for this revised edition of my biography of Mussolini I have found the task of re-examining my words both pleasurable and troubling. There are some matters that are simple and obvious. So I have corrected a few errors. In one of his last moments of optimistic maliciousness before his death Mussolini savoured the idea of leaving what he called ‘social mines to float damagingly into post-war Italy. Whether or not he succeeded is a matter addressed in the last chapter of my biography. But certainly factual mistakes are the equivalent threat in a historian’s prose hard if not impossible to eliminate entirely but always to be amended with alacrity and a shamed face when the author is alerted to them. Similarly I have up-dated the text where the intervening years have brought to light new evidence that is significant enough to demand its presence. One example in Mussolini’s case is the research into his bigamous marriage with Ida Dalser and his and his brother Arnaldo’s treatment of Dalser and her son Benito Albino through to their separate deaths cruelly confined in mental institutions. In this regard and more generally I have re-worked the book’s bibliography to add important new material on this and other aspects of the Duce’s life.