Benito Mussolini

MS modelled this book around her own teacher, Christina Kay , a character in search of an author. She had begun to write about Miss Kay even as a girl, and her closest schoolfriend,...

This novel is an extraordinary tour de force in taking Lawrence's patterns of thought and speech to write a refutation, through a female narrator (his protagonist herself), of his sexual theories. EF traces forwards both...

She observes that she can write at first hand about most of the men who—to-day—are making war, or struggling to prevent it in three continents. The dominant figures of Hitler and Stalin are flanked...

Throughout all the vicissitudes of her life she remained a great traveller. On this occasion, when they put in at Rome, Lord Runciman (RL 's father-in-law) had a private audience with Mussolini and...

In 1938 MS and her husband had thought of going to Vienna on holiday, but Hitler's recent occupation of Austria decided them on Italy instead, which they toured by train. They were in Rome for...

Once she had recovered, the Muirs moved back to the Continent, arriving in St Tropez in the spring of 1926. WM later wrote that they were, it seems, turning into Europeans, after all.

The prime minister and foreign minister offered her another free holiday. She had already, however, travelled through High Albania with a pony-train (one of the most wonderful things, she wrote later, in a life full...