UNLIKE HITLER OR Stalin, of whom there are any number of decent modern biographies, Mussolini still seems ill-served by historians, at least those writing in English. A couple of years ago the Australian Richard Bosworth had a go, to no great effect, and now Nicholas Farrell has produced 'A New Life' of the bald bruiser from the Romagna.

Readers of The Spectator will know Farrell's vignettes of life in present-day Predappio - the town where Mussolini was born and where his family tomb, replete with a marble bust of the former Duce, attracts both the curious and the Fascist faithful, no doubt to the postembarrassment of Italy's current