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Judith Keene

Judith Keene reviews 'Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the dictatorship 1915–1945' by Richard Bosworth

June-July 2006, no. 282 01 June 2006
One thing is certain: Mussolini would not like this book. Indeed, it is exactly the sort of writing that would rouse Il Duce’s ire. In the last disintegrating days before his ignominious end, when Mussolini realised that his erstwhile allies, the Germans, had outmanoeuvred him, that members of his inner circle were frantically making arrangements to flee Italy, and that partisan uprisings had se ... (read more)

Judith Keene reviews ‘The Oxford Handbook of Fascism’ edited by R.J.B. Bosworth

October 2009, no. 315 01 October 2009
In a delightful memoir of a boyhood spent in Mussolini’s Italy, Umberto Eco recalled that the heady days of the Liberation in his small town near Milan were encapsulated in the taste of Wrigley’s Spearmint, given by an African-American GI (New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995). After the years of ‘palefaces in blackshirts’, these Americans appeared like exotic time travellers from the fu ... (read more)

Judith Keene reviews 'Companion to Women’s Historical Writing' edited by Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys, and Barbara Caine

April 2010, no 320 01 April 2010
Do not be put off by the earnest and fusty-sounding title. The Companion to Women’s Historical Writing is not a book to acquire for the reference shelf on the off chance of needing to look up some arcane topic in the future. Quite the contrary. I have found it to be a most enjoyable bedside companion. Arranged alphabetically, with more than one hundred and fifty entries, it offers thumbnail sket ... (read more)