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In 1945, disguised in German greatcoat and helmet, Mussolini attempted to escape from the advancing Allied armies. Unfortunately for him, the convoy of which he was part was stopped by partisans and his features, made so familiar by Fascist propaganda, gave him away. Within 24 hours he was executed by his captors, joining those he sent early to their graves as an outcome of his tyranny, at least one million people. He was one of the tyrant-killers who so scarred interwar Europe, but we cannot properly understand him or his regime by any simple equation with Hitler or Stalin. Like them, his life began modestly in the provinces; unlike them, he maintained a traditonal male family life, includi...
The Battle of Bosworth along with Hastings and Naseby is one of the most important battles in English history and on the death of Richard, ushered in the age of the Tudors. This is the story of two very different men, Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England and Henry Tudor and how they met in battle on 22 August 1485 at Bosworth Field.
“An intriguing addition to the history of Bosworth battlefield, clearly based on painstaking research and beautifully illustrated throughout.” —Leicestershire Historian The Wars of the Roses came to a bloody climax at the Battle of Bosworth on August 22 1485. In a few hours, on a stretch of otherwise unremarkable fields in Leicestershire, Richard III, Henry Tudor and their Yorkist and Lancastrian supporters clashed. This decisive moment in English history ought to be clearly recorded and understood, yet controversy has confused our understanding of where and how the battle was fought. That is why Richard Mackinder’s highly illustrated and personal account of the search for evidence o...
For almost all nations the First World War was an unparalleled disaster, but the Italian experience especially was to have catastrophic consequences. Weakened and embittered, trying and failing to come to terms with 600,000 dead and with an entire generation of men militarized by fighting, Italy gave birth to a new form of political life: Fascism. Richard Bosworth brings to life the period when Italians participated in a vast and ultimately ruinous political experiment under their dictator, Benito Mussolini, and his fascist henchmen. The fascists were the first totalitarians, aiming to reshape Italy and its people utterly. Their regime was based on a cult of violence and obedience. Yet, desp...
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.
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.
Mussolini was one of the tyrant-killers of the Axis powers who scarred Europe during World War II, but we can't properly understand him or his regime by any facile equation with Hitler or Stalin. Like them, his life began modestly in the provinces; unlike them, he maintained a traditional male family life, including both a wife and mistresses, and sought in his way to be an intellectual. He was cruel (though not the cruelest); his racism existed, but never with the consistency and vigor that would have made him a good recruit for the SS. He sought an empire, but, for the most part, his was of the old-fashioned, costly, nineteenth-century variety, not of a racial or ideological imperialism. A...
First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
A master historian illuminates the tumultuous relationship of Il Duce and his young lover Claretta, whose extraordinarily intimate diaries only recently have become available Few deaths are as gruesome and infamous as those of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator, and Claretta (or Clara) Petacci, his much-younger lover. Shot dead by Italian partisans after attempting to flee the country in 1945, the couple’s bodies were then hanged upside down in Milan’s main square in ignominious public display. This provocative book is the first to mine Clara’s extensive diaries, family correspondence, and other sources to discover how the last in Mussolini’s long line of lovers became his intimate and how she came to her violent fate at his side. R. J. B. Bosworth explores the social climbing of Claretta’s family, her naïve and self-interested commitment to fascism, her diary’s graphically detailed accounts of sexual life with Mussolini, and much more. Brimful of new and arresting information, the book sheds intimate light not only on an ordinary-extraordinary woman living at the heart of Italy’s totalitarian fascist state but also on Mussolini himself.
In 1485 on a battlefield in Bosworth, King Richard III was dealt a death blow by the man who had sworn loyalty to him only a few months earlier. He was Rhys ap Thomas. This is the story of the man who helped forge the course of British history.