The Woman Who Shot Mussolini: Frances Stonor Saunders
7 April 1926: on the steps of the Capitol in Rome, surrounded by chanting Fascists, the Honourable Violet Gibson raises her revolver and fires at the Italian head of state, the poster-boy of the European Right and darling of the British ruling class. The bullet narrowly misses the dictator’s bald head, hitting him in the nose. Of all his would-be assassins, she came closest to changing the course of history.What had brought her to this moment? She was the daughter of an important Anglo-Irish peer, born to privilege and ease. Her family was Protestant, Unionist and conservative. She should have married into the aristocracy and lived the life that women of her milieu were expected to lead.
Yet terrible unhappiness lurked beneath that glittering surface. She was a serious-minded young woman in an age when girls were meant to think as little as possible and to avoid intellectual or political excitement. Her spiritual quest brought her to a kind of left-wing Catholicism and to sympathy for Irish nationalism, to the horror of her family who exacted a severe emotional cost from her for her rebellion. And she fell in love with Italy, and watched as Mussolini’s thugs took it into the moral cesspit of Fascism. She felt she had to act.
But Violet Gibson, unlike Hitler’s attempted assassins, never received the smallest recognition for her gesture. She was merely a ‘mad woman’, or judged to be so by a world that then thought Mussolini perfectly sane. She was confined to a lunatic asylum after a ten-minute interview with a society doctor, condemned without trial to a whole-life sentence without parole. She died in 1956. Her letters to friends languished unsent, and she never had a chance of being released, even after Mussolini declared war on Britain.
Frances Stonor Saunders’ unforgettable and compulsively readable book rescues this gentle, driven woman from a silent void and restores her dignity and purpose. More
My Ear at His Heart: Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi offers a remarkable insight into the birth of a writer - himself - through this memoir that conjures up a family story of how he found his own ... More
Elizabeth in the Garden: Trea Martyn
The beguiling story of how Elizabeth I’s two great courtiers fought a lifelong duel for her affections - by creating ever more lavish gardens for their queen. More
Cavalier: Lucy Worsley
From Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, comes the story of the last great cavalier. William Cavendish embodies the popular image of a cavalier. He was both ... More
Storm and Conquest: Stephen Taylor
By 1809 the Indian Ocean was the final battleground for Nelson’s Navy and the French fleet. At stake was Britain's commercial lifeline to India - and its strategic capacity to ... More
The White War: Mark Thompson
One of the most critically-acclaimed history books of last year. The first narrative history in English of the Italian front: a major forgotten conflict of the First World War. More
Newton and the Counterfeiter: Thomas Levenson
After he had become the most famous scientist in Europe for his theories of planetary motion and gravity, Isaac Newton felt he had a right to earn more serious money ... But how? More
The Last Englishman: Roland Chambers
Long before Swallows and Amazons was published, there had been another Arthur Ransome, famous for different reasons. MI6? Bolshevism? All is revealed ... More
Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You: Marcus Chown
White Noise, Big Bangs, Parallel Worlds and Quantum Theory! Marcus Chown explains everything. More
Sibelius Volume I: 1865-1905: Erik Tawaststjerna
A monumental work of translation, and a remarkable 25-year working relationship between the composer and Robert Layton, as he explains. More
Various Voices: Harold Pinter
Various Voices is the only collection of Harold Pinter’s prose, poems and political writing to span his career. This new edition includes a remarkable interview in which he reflects on ... More
Showing 1 - 10 of 800 Results
