Channel 4, and a star was born this week, in the shape of Guy Martin, presenter of How Britain Worked

This original, revealing and disturbing book provides a grassroots view of fascist Italy

Duggan’s superbly researched book uncovers the nasty reality of [Mussolini’s] regime and demonstrates that there was a disturbing symbiotic relationship between fascism and the Catholic Church

In his magnificent new book, a pathbreaking study that everyone interested in Fascism, or in Italy past and present, should read, Christopher Duggan fills the gap by examining a wide range of diaries… This enables Duggan to deliver not merely a detailed account of popular attitudes towards the regime, but, far more, a general history of Fascism that for the first time treats it, not as a tyranny that allowed ordinary Italians no possibility of expressing themselves freely, nor as the brutal dictatorship of a capitalist class that reduced the great majority of the country’s citizens to the status of victims, but as a regime rooted strongly in popular aspirations and desires.

Magnificent...a pathbreaking study that everyone interested in fascism, or in Italy past and present, should read

Excellent new history of Italian Fascism

An elegantly written study that is the work of a historian at the height of his powers

Fluid and absorbing

Draws on a vast range of private letters and diaries to find out what ordinary people thought about the regime that ruled them between 1922 and 1945

Draws on a vast range of private letters and diaries

Pankaj Mishra has produced a riveting account that makes new and illuminating connections. He follows the intellectual trail of this contested history with both intelligence and moral clarity. In the end we realise that what we are holding in our hands is not only a deeply entertaining and deeply humane book, but a balance sheet of the nature and mentality of colonisation

Highly readable and illuminating ... Mishra's analysis of Muslim reactions is particularly topical

Enormously ambitious but thoroughly readable, this book is essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today's Asia

Sophisticated ... not so much polemic as cri de coeur, motivated by Mishra's keen sense of the world, East and West, hurtling towards its own destruction

Outstanding ... Mishra wears his scholarship lightly and weaves together the many strands of history into a gripping narrative ... The insights afforded by this book are too many to be enumerated ... Mishra performs a signal service to the future - by making us read the past in a fresh light

[Full of] complexity and nuance

Subtle, erudite and entertaining

Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia

A vital, nuanced argument ... prodigious