Word: mussolini
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...appalling," grumbled H. G. Wells, "that this blinkered, pleasant, gossipy, gullible snob," Sir Samuel Hoare should be named British Ambassador to Spain. Wells was not the only one to wince. The nauseous memory of the Hoare-Laval Deal to appease Mussolini (1935) was still fresh. That of the Hitler-sweetening at Munich was even fresher. In 1940 Britain needed someone to talk straight, not sweet, to Spain's Franco. Sir Samuel hardly seemed the man. He had passed "from experience to experience, like Boccaccio's virgin," said a wag, "without discernible effect upon his condition...
...first "with nothing higher in it than a five of clubs." German prestige was boundless; German spies and informers were thick underfoot. A "very sinister" Turk named Lazar, attached to the German Embassy although he was a Jew, controlled the Spanish press. Seated before signed photographs of Hitler and Mussolini, Dictator Franco received the British envoy with polite disdain. "Why don't you end the war now?" Franco asked. "You can never...
...Franco been a little less sly, and Hitler and Mussolini a little less stupid, Spain would have joined the Axis, Sir Samuel believes. It was largely luck that Spain stayed out and pretended to be neutral-luck, plus Allied economic bait, plus the sympathies of a few Spaniards, notably Count Francisco Gomez Jordana, for two years (1942-44) Franco's Minister for Foreign Affairs...
...Past. Into the second day's fray shuffled a bizarre figure out of Socialism's pre-Fascist past. She was tiny (5 ft.), pale Angelica Balabanov, leftist Socialist refugee from the Soviet Union, who in Italy had once been the friend and close associate of Benito Mussolini in his Socialist days. She has remained one of Italian Socialism's most legendary heroines. Said Balabanov: "I left Russia when I realized that the Revolution had been converted into a matter of political exploitation."* The delegates reacted as if they had been lashed, and for 30 minutes shouts...
...reputation on the main stem as a man who could keep a secret. Charnay once posed as a murderer's attorney to get an interview in a cell at the Tombs, hid in a French actress' stateroom closet to get an exclusive story on her "life with Mussolini...