As well as writing about trailblazing women – Freya Stark, Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn – Caroline Moorehead has also focused on pacifists, refugees and deportees. Her books are scholarly and readable because she always seems able to find stories that combine history and human rights, female bravery and antifascism (or else nonconformity).
Edda Mussolini is, perhaps, a subject it’s harder to warm to. Benito Mussolini’s first child with Rachele Guidi, Edda was born in 1910, and her early years were marked by poverty, beatings and instability. Her father was
