Word: hibbert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...DUCE (367 pp.)-Christopher Hibbert-Little Brown...
That he was one of the most fascinating characters of the 20th century is clear from this new biography by British Historian Christopher Hibbert...
...What a Character." Few recall that Mussolini once fancied himself as "the Lenin of Italy" and that Lenin himself (though Hibbert does not record the fact) returned the compliment by calling him the most hopeful prospect for Bolshevism among Europe's Socialists. In those days before World War I, Mussolini was a wide-eyed, impoverished zealot living in Milan. He edited a paper called La Lotta di Classe (The Class War), had written an anticlerical novelette, The Cardinal's Mistress, and was dedicated to revolution -particularly the violent revolution of the Communist creed. "Who has steel has bread...
...after World War I (in which, according to Hibbert, Mussolini was a good soldier), Mussolini broke with Bolshevism because of its call for international solidarity of the workers against mere national governments. He sent squads of his blackshirted thugs against the Communists then forming Soviets in towns all over northern Italy. He believed that the factories should be taken over, all right-but that he should take them in the name of Italy. To little King Victor Emmanuel III, he seemed to promise order in a chaos of revolutionaries; the midget monarch asked him to take charge...
...advanced. Their 32-year-old general, attired in a splendid new uniform and waving a cane, was an easy target for snipers. Just before victory was certain he fell, a musket ball through his lung. (Hours later, the Marquis de Montcalm also died of his wounds.) It was. Author Hibbert says, the death Wolfe always wanted; months before, he had written in a clumsy paraphrase of Horace: "Those who perish in their duty and in the service of their country, die honourably...