In 1945, disguised in German greatcoat and helmet, Mussolini attempted to escape from the advancing Allied armies. Unfortunately for him, the convoy of which he was part was stopped by partisans and his features, made so familiar by Fascist propaganda, gave him away. Within 24 hours he was dead, executed by his captors. He joined those he sent early to their graves as an outcome of his dictatorship - at least a million people, and probably more. He was one of the tyrant-killers who so scarred interwar Europe, but we cannot properly understand him or his regime by any simple equation with Hitler or Stalin. Like Hitler and Stalin, his life began, modestly, in the provinces; unlike them, he maintained a traditional male family life, including both wife and mistresses, and sought in his way to be an intellectual. He was both cruel (but not the cruellist); his racism existed, but never without the consistency and vigour that would have made him a good recruit for the SS. He sought an empire; but, in the most part, his was of the old-fashione, costly, 19th-century variety, not a racial or ideological imperium. Also, self-evidently Italian society was not German or Russian: the particualr patterns of that society shaped his dictatorship. This book allows the reader to come closer to an appreciation of the life and actions of the man and of the political world and society within which he operated. Drawing on a range of sources, this biography paints a picture of brutality and failure, yet one tempered with an understanding of Mussolini as a human being, not so different from many of his contemporaries.