Dunkirk–Alamein–Bologna: Letters and diaries of an artilleryman 1939–1945 (1994) is based on the letters written by Christopher Seton Watson while on active duty as an officer in the Royal Horse Artillery in the Second World War. In this essay, the correspondence provides a platform for exploring first how CSW's wartime experiences coloured his views on Italy and Italian politics, and then the ways in which those views had developed and changed by the time he published his major study of the crisis of Italian liberalism (Italy from liberalism to fascism 1870–1925 (1967).

This article examines the changing attitude of the Sicilian statesman Francesco Crispi towards Britain between the 1850s and the end of the century. While Crispi had enormous admiration for Britain, and recognised that Italy had much to learn from its political system, he also acknowledged that the British constitution was the product of a long process of historical evolution and could never be imitated slavishly in Italy. From the end of the 1870s in particular, Crispi felt that Italy could not concede the degree of freedom permitted in Britain until the state had completed its work of what he called ‘political education’. As prime minister in the 1880s and 1890s Crispi looked to an aggressive foreign policy to strengthen Italy's beleaguered institutions, and he counted on British support to achieve this. The refusal of Britain to back him in the way he hoped left him perplexed and ultimately disillusioned about what he had felt was a special friendship between the two countries.

This paper addresses the question of whether the Italian Lega Nord pursues functional policies in spite of its postfunctional rhetoric (politics of simulation) or pre-material policies that are in line with its dominant postfunctional discourse (politics of identity). The analysis focuses on fiscal federalism because this is an area that links together both economic issues – fiscal autonomy is seen as highly functional to the economy of those regions of Italy which form the Lega Nord's strongholds – and identity matters – federalism is claimed and justified on the basis of the existence of a distinct territorial community with its own cultural values and social cohesion. The paper concludes that the Lega combines postfunctional rhetoric and ‘formal’ policies on the one hand, with functional ‘actual’ outcomes on the other. This combination, which hitherto appeared to be a winning electoral formula, has recently run into difficulties.

This article analyses the parallels between the role played by the Church, first during the Crisis of the Liberal State in the early twentieth century and then during the transition from the Christian Democratic regime to the ‘bi-polar’ Second Republic more than 70 years later. It explores both the particular, contingent forces at work in each, and the underlying explanations as to why the Church was able to successfully exploit these two processes of transition in the political history of Italy to its advantage. It concludes by arguing that the experience of these two crises demonstrates that the Church is not only a powerful force in Italian civil society but also effectively ‘a state within a state’ in relation to the functioning of Italy's political structures.

One of the principal justifications for the military coup of 1936 and the subsequent plan of extermination behind right-wing violence in the Civil War was the accusation that the Second Republic was the anti-Spanish instrument of the Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy. Thus, when the conspirators declared that punishment had to be inflicted on freemasons, liberal politicians, journalists, school-teachers, professors, as well as on leftists and trade-unionists, they used the idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world. Of all of the writers who called for an assault on progressive Spain, those who might be termed the ‘theorists of extermination’, the most influential was the Catalan priest, Juan Tusquets Terrats (1901–1998). Awareness and approval of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was promoted through his enormously popular writings. During the Civil War, he became an adviser to Generals Mola and Franco and his file-card index of names of supposed freemasons was part of the infrastructure of repression.

The Centre for the Advanced Study of Italian Society was created by Stuart Woolf at Reading University in 1966. It provided the institutional basis for close collaboration with Italian academics and politicians, many of whom participated in seminars. It attracted funding from Italy for research collaboration with Italian academics. The presence of the Centre led to donations from English antifascists of books and archives, and to the acquisition by the University Library of a major Italian private library on post-unity Italian history and culture.