For Hitler when he came to power Mussolini was the great inspiration and model fascism, totalitarianism, the charismatic ruler, terror and intimidation were all worked out and perfected in Italy many years before they came to Germany. And yet, as Richard Bosworth shows in his brilliant new book, there were huge differences between the two regimes, even if ultimately they both went down in flames together. Italy was in many other ways both the pioneer and goad for a European instability that fed ultimately into the Armageddon of 1939-45. Devastated and embittered by its experience of the First World War, Italy under Mussolini subverted, damaged and besmirched any possible democratic or peaceful future. And yet for many ordinary Italians (and this book, among other things, is wonderful on the lives and feelings of ordinary people all over the peninsula and islands) the dictatorship never had the stranglehold on their lives and minds that Mussolini and his associates dreamt that they had.