A book swarming with people, each one of whose stories adds another touch to the big picture … This is history as viewed, not by those who shaped it, but by those who endured it … Clear, cool, plainly written and devastating.

Excellent … Highly readable … A fascinating glimpse into the actual experience of living under fascist terror… The first book I have read which brings the reader to the heart of the period.

John Foot has written some fine books on Italy … Blood and Power: the Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism is his finest to date … He has given us a superb historical work, accessible and weighty, of how fascism once gripped a country, and has never fully let go. Blood and Power is essential reading of a political past that presages warning signs for all our political futures.

Foot has provided us with new villains and heroes … [and] tells the interested reader stories that they will have probably never heard before

This book is not a history of Italy, nor a Mussolini biography, but a study of his political movement — a fragmented word gallery of personalities and events

Meticulous … Fascinating … Where Foot’s book is invaluable is in the light it sheds on dozens of unremembered heroes – who often, like [Giuseppe] Di Vagno, gave their lives attempting to save Italy from dictatorship – and in providing rounded pictures of men and women whose adventures we know about only partially.

Foot’s fascinating book offers a new and disturbing reading of the Fascist era and its origins … He presents a compelling kaleidoscope of individual stories that break through fascism’s historic silences

Magnificent … A tremendous work: vivid, visceral, and highly relevant to our own time … Foot is a terrific writer and brings to life some of the key characters and events of the period … Instead of dense political theory or detailed chronology, Foot gives us a history “through episodes, fragments, massacres and trials, moments of violence and escape, defeats and victories, silences and noise, rhetoric and reality”. His approach succeeds brilliantly

A deeply detailed historical excavation but written in part as warning … John Foot is an academic who writes like a journalist (this is a compliment)

Lively, readable and provocative …. John Foot uses anecdotes and episodes, vignettes and thumbnail portraits to tell the story of Fascism … Foot’s plausible thesis is that it was violence that brought Fascism to power and underpinned the regime … Overall, Foot’s quirky book is a joy

This is scholarly history at its best – vivid and clear. John Foot’s narrative glitters from beginning to end. It offers both a highly readable account of Mussolini’s ventennio and a rare depiction of how ordinary – and a few extraordinary – Italians experienced his thuggish dictatorship. Warmly recommended for anyone seeking to know what can happen when power falls into the hands of vainglorious nationalists.

Fascinating and illuminating throughout. John Foot has done the hard work of documenting in great detail the many lives and events that connected the Italy of the common people with the figure of Mussolini. Blood and Power offers disturbing intuitions as to the role of violence in the politics of the modern era.

A highly readable, horrifying and extremely timely overview

A gripping new history of fascism that privileges the voices of ordinary Italians and reminds us of the central role of violence in establishing and enforcing Mussolini’s dictatorship. An excellent and timely work.

One hundred years after the rise to power of Fascism in Italy, John Foot’s bracing and bold Blood and Power vividly recreates the on-the-ground experience of life under the regime.