Achtung! Ampelmännchen sagt halt! The point just after Davey Street turns into Sandy Bay Road. June 2012. Just the one book finished this week, and a trip back in time with Mussolini And The Rise Of Fascism by the academic/ historian Donald Sassoon. Sassoon is the author of what is to my mind the definitive work (and weighty tome coming in well over 1,000 pages long) on continental European socialism, One Hundred Years of Socialism , so I was looking forward to his analysis of the development of fascism in Italy. You might already be familiar with the tale: in 1919 the former socialist newspaper editor-cum small time political player Benito Mussolini had assembled a ragtag group of followers in Milan and launched the movement that was to result three years later in a dictatorship. This itself would last 23 years, and draw Italy into an escalating number of foreign interventions, ending ultimately with a disastrous war that was to leave large parts of her in ruins. Oddly enough...