In the Conclusion, I record the rival fates of Giovanni and Giorgio Amendola since 1980, whether in scholarship, public memory or Italian streetscapes. In each regard, the liberal democrat Giovanni Amendola has moved up and the communist Giorgio Amendola down. The (humane) communist world Giorgio believed in has all but totally disappeared. But liberal democracy, however much transmuted by an all but totalitarian neoliberalism, has prospered and, perhaps, triumphed. Certainly, when the centenary of Giovanni’s death occurs in 1926, it is likely that he will be celebrated as a father of his patria. What might be viewed as the historical limitations of his understanding of where the world was going, his all but non-existent commentary on capitalism and finance, his patriarchalism, his positive view of Italian imperialism – these no longer matter. He can take the leading place as his country’s most admirable saint and martyr of Anti-Fascism.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between Giovanni Amendola and Nelia Pavlova, born 1895. This complex love story has been all but entirely ignored by Italian scholarship on Giovanni and in the national memory. Apparently, the couple had a son who died of meningitis at the age of six in 1929. In Giovanni’s papers there is evidence of the love affair but no acknowledgement of the child. Since Nelia also claims on occasion to have been ‘married’ to Giovanni, some doubt must remain about the veracity of her account. She was a young woman who resembled Eva Kühn in quite a few ways: foreign, multilingual, independent, from her country’s leading political classes, intellectually able. Nelia was one the three people at Giovanni’s deathbed in Cannes (Giorgio was another). Over time, however, the Amendolas, as they put it, ‘lost contact’ with her. Yet she made for herself a distinguished career as a Paris journalist, an expert in Eastern Europe. While the Amendola sons became communists, she remained a liberal democrat, as well as a woman who always remembered Giovanni as her man. Her death probably occurred in 1940. She should not have been forgotten as easily as she has been.

Through pinpointing how Churchill’s perceptions of aerial bombardment evolved across his political career, this chapter highlights the ambivalence and incongruence that dogged his bombing policy from its earliest days: ultimately arguing that his vacillating approach towards the Allied bombing campaign – and his eventual calculated detachment from it – was not out of character. The chapter begins by establishing his preliminary beliefs about aerial bombardment; next, it traces how his bombing theory converted into destructive reality, from ‘aerially policing’ the British Empire in the 1920s to the Combined Bomber Offensive; finally, it examines how Churchill attempted to reconcile his incriminating role in the German firestorms with a war-scarred Britain after 1945.

We will turn now to two symbolic images: The allegory of Injustice in the Arena Chapel (Padua) by Giotto di Bondone (1303–1305) and the allegory of War in the Palazzo Pubblico (Siena) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338–1339). They are major milestones in the visualization of rape in European art, condemnatory representations intended for a public audience. Despite the extensive secondary literature on these sites, the representations of sexual violence have never been examined or compared to each other, even in specialist studies. They can potentially reconfigure our views of wartime rape before modernity.

Anna Akhmatova is a prominent presence in international canons of war poetry, yet her range and significance as a war poet remains underappreciated. Akhmatova is unique among Russian poets, given the Soviet emphasis on 1917 as historical watershed, in identifying 1914 in hindsight as the start of the ‘real’ twentieth century. This chapter situates Akhmatova’s tragic, patriotic view of war in its contemporary intellectual context, and in that of scholarship on gender and war poetry. It examines key lyrics, focusing on religious and pastoral motifs, and highlights Akhmatova’s distinctive approach through comparison with the poetry of her soldier husband, Nikolai Gumilev. Overall, it argues that the war marked an important transition in Akhmatova’s writing, allowing her to develop the characteristic blending of individual with collective voice – and ethical emphasis on memory and bearing of historical witness – that are commonly associated with her later work and which continue to resonate now.

Focusing on the various rounds of debates between the 1620s and 1640s on whether or how to seek peace or truce in the war with the Dutch Republic, this explores how agents and counsellors from different parts of the Spanish monarchy navigated the conflict between ideology and necessity-driven pragmatism in contexts of concrete decision-making. Directed at preserving and re-establishing dominion over the various realms of the monarchy, reason of state was at the heart of this weighing of principle and pragmatism. Agents were at the centre of a constant cycle of collecting and assessing information, projecting likely future courses and searching for the utmost expedience within the boundaries of royal conscience and obligations. What solutions were conceivable when attempts to preserve dominion over the Low Countries ran contrary to the demands of the Catholic faith and the preservation of the rest of the monarchy? Could special circumstances allow for special measures or concessions that might deviate from the princely obligations towards justice and the Faith? The chapter shows that as each decade of the war added to its own history, pragmatic arguments and solutions were often inspired by experience, together with a notion of extenuating necessity.

This chapter focuses on how Bolaño’s short novel Amulet (1998) approaches the tumultuous period of Mexico 1968, with its effervescent student movement and the subsequent violent governmental repression that led to the military occupation of the country’s most important university, UNAM, as well as the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2nd. Through the narration of Auxilio, an Uruguayan poet who remained locked in a women’s bathroom at UNAM during the two week span of the university’s occupation, the novel reconstructs this period yet shies away from a linear, chronological narration with a transparent claim to truth. On the contrary, by intertwining historical facts with fiction, Amulet’s unreliable and anachronistic narrator works against closure, embracing political defeat as a means to propose listening as a form of continued engagement.

The Greeks often saw Egypt as a model of long-term cultural stability; in fact, Egyptian history is full of ruptures – periods of instability or external invasions – and a major theme in Egyptian literature is the methods by which such threats to continuity were resisted. This chapter looks at several modes of resistance illustrated by Greco-Egyptian literature of the first millennium. It looks at three topics: first, heroes of the Egyptian resistance to Persia (in Herodotus and the Inaros Cycle); secondly, resistance narratives in the Ptolemaic Period: the story of Nectanebo’s Dream (which probably presented the Ptolemies as re-establishing legitimate kingship in Egypt after the Persians) and the apocalyptic Oracles of the Potter and the Lamb (probably directed at the ‘Typhonian’ Ptolemies). The chapter closes by looking at Manetho’s narrative of Egyptian resistance to the foreign Hyksos rulers, which corresponds to events in the mid-second millennium BCE and the foundation of the New Kingdom. It asks whether Manetho’s narrative should be interpreted as reflecting contemporary concerns with foreign rule and resistance to it.

Chapter 3 tests our theory against the historical record. It introduces readers to a few contentious episodes in recent Ukrainian history, focusing on three major crises between 1991 and 2014. Our analytic narrative emphasizes that Russian-speaking communities can embrace “the Russian narrative” at critical junctures theatrically, in order to maximize their bargaining leverage or demonstrate an ability to destabilize Ukrainian national politics, and then be bought off. In each of three case studies, we document Russian-speaking elites bargaining in strikingly similar ways: provoking crises at the center, knowing that Russias military casts a shadow over regional bargaining dynamics. The Party of Regions is described as a machine for aggregating preferences across multiple constituencies with a strong base in the Donbas – the primary driver of the controversial language law of 2012.

Roberto Bolaño’s writing emphasizes the ways exile shapes individual and collective responses to traumatic losses, which are often produced by state violence. The dispersive nature of these responses demands an approach to collective memory that resists the purported coherence of the national narrative. My analysis considers the effort to establish coherency in By Night in Chile in contrast to the calls for openness that characterize the other texts I analyze: The Spirit of Science Fiction, “Visit to the Convalescent,” and Woes of the True Policeman. In reference to discussions of memory and trauma by Adeila Assmann and Nelly Richard, my reading of Bolaño’s texts pairs a critique of authorial coherence with a critique of national coherence. I focus especially on narrative boundaries and fissures, including the motifs of holes and storms. I conclude that an open, interrelational textual analysis of a single author’s work enables a critique of that work that, in turn, strengthens a critique of national narratives and their propensity to conceal traumatic pasts.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

After many years of living the Bohemian life of a poet in Mexico, Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) moved to Spain and decided to make a living out of literature. Sophie Podolski´s motto, “Writing is a living thing,” was Bolaño´s unique way of approaching literature while practicing literary criticism, rewriting the literary history of Spanish Letters and reconfiguring the Western literary canon in a global world. Soon after the end of the millennium, he became a global literary superstar and the most recognized Latin American contemporary writer. In this chapter, Bolaño´s journey – from an unknown brave poet to a celebrated barbarian novelist – is mapped out through three novellas: Amulet (1999), Distant Star (1996) and Monsieur Pain (1999 [1981–82]). The protagonists of these texts, poets and poetry, show the underlying intense eroticism of power through violence, malice, horror, agony, but also, love, joy, generosity, and tenderness. Making zig-zags, shifts and displacements, the analysis weaves his migrant memories through several geocultural leaps – from Mexico City to Santiago de Chile, and then to Paris – while accentuating the most hideous horrors of a more-than-symbolic modern twentieth century to critique the unfolding of Western civilization through pivotal temporal clusters – the 1960s, 1970s, 1930s–40s.