Book Review: Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press

Abstract

British fascism?’ She argues quite convincingly that the blackshirts believed that they held sole proprietorship over virility and ‘heterosexual potency’ and that this belief was invested ‘in their fanatical admiration for their supremely masculine leader, Sir Oswald Mosley’. He was ‘the Rudolph Valentino of Fascism’. Nevertheless, she leaves the most important question unasked, let alone unanswered. Mosley’s charisma and alpha-masculinity might well have captivated his followers, both men and women, but they had no such effect on the great mass of the British people. For all Mosley’s potency, the success of fascist movements did not derive from such ‘cultural’ phenomena, but from the balance of class forces and the depth of the social and economic crisis. There are also excellent essays on Anglo-Italian solidarity, on fascist attitudes towards the theatre and to music and on the Back To The Land movement. Altogether, it is a valuable addition to the growing library of books on British fascism.