The New York Times

Outside Party Lines

CARLO ROSSELLI Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile. By Stanislao G. Pugliese. Illustrated. 309 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $35. Carlo Rosselli — one of the most courageous and interesting figures of Italian antifascism — is a rich and overdue subject for a biography. Arrested in Italy in 1926 for underground activities, Rosselli escaped to…

Continue reading

There’ll Always Be Something or Other

  ANGLOMANIA A European Love Affair. By Ian Buruma. 304 pp. New York: Random House. $25.95. IN ”Anglomania” Ian Buruma presents the history of an idea — the idea of Britain — which has loomed so large and meant so many different things in the European imagination in recent centuries. To some, Britain is a…

Continue reading

Paisans

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBERTO ROSSELLINI By Tag Gallagher. Illustrated. 802 pp. New York: Da Capo Press. Paper, $24.50. In the preface to his biography of the Italian film director Roberto Rossellini, Tag Gallagher describes how, as a penniless young film buff, he slept outdoors in the rain and on any available floor over the course…

Continue reading

The World’s Greatest Salesman

THE POLITICAL CAREER OF THE ITALIAN MEDIA MAGNATE SILVIO BERLUSCONI STARTED, appropriately enough, with a videocassette. On Jan. 26, 1994, Berlusconi addressed the Italian people on all three of his national television networks. Within two months, he turned Italy’s political world upside down, created a new political party from scratch and won national elections that…

Continue reading