A Chill in the Air
An Italian War Diary 1939-1940
Iris Origo
Pushkin Press
192 pages; Rs 399
History has relegated Benito Mussolini to the role of the junior partner in the Axis coalition of World War II, a caricature dictator whose Fascist creed Adolf Hitler moulded and expanded into a sinister dogma and who bailed his inept armies out in North Africa and Greece. One consequence of this received imagery has been that we have far fewer books on the Italian dictator or accounts of life under his 22-year-rule — nearly twice as long as Hitler’s — written or translated in English than