"This important new life of Mussolini by a talented new biographer draws on a vast range of fresh material to challenge the standard version of Italy's fascist dictator as either grotesque buffoon, hell bent on war in Europe (the liberal version), or tool of the bourgeoisie in its war with the working class (the Marxist version)." "To get power and hold it by and large bloodlessly through two decades, as Mussolini did until his disastrous alliance with Hitler, required much more than that. Such was the magnetism of the man Churchill called 'the Roman genius' and Pope Pius XI 'sent by Providence', and so strong the appeal of fascism, that the only honest verdict is that he ruled by popular demand." "Mussolini was as popular with women as men. Behind every great man, it is said, there is a woman. Behind this great dictator, who had 169 lovers according to one estimate, stood a nation of women. It was his politics they found most attractive. He did away with democracy but he did not use mass murder to stay in power. There was no need. To the bitter end, there was little resistance to him by Italians because support for him remained so strong." "His fatal error was his alliance with Hitler whom he despised. But this alliance was far from inevitable, the result more of Anglo-French incompetence and his fear of Hitler than a wild desire for war or world domination, let alone the extermination of the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust had begun he and his Fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives." "This new biography also forces us to wonder whether Mussolini - a revolutionary Socialist who founded Fascism as an alternative left-wing revolutionary movement - had better vision than Marx. For whereas Communism appears terminally ill, Fascism's Third Way between Capitalism and Communism lives on, championed by standard bearers of the modern left such as New Labour." "To assume that Fascism was a phenomenon of the extreme right is to miss the point: Mussolini despised the bourgeois way of life - la vita comoda - above all else and he remained at heart a Socialist to his dying day."--BOOK JACKET.