Books: Fascist Memoirs

CIANO'S HIDDEN DIARY, 1937-1938 (220 pp.)—Dutton ($4).

"Dead men tell no tales," Benito Mussolini once reminded Count Galeazzo Ciano, little realizing that the son-in-law he ordered shot in January 1944 would prove a talkative exception. As Italy's Foreign Minister from 1936 to 1943, Ciano jotted day-to-day entries in a red diary. The first volume, covering 1939-43, appeared in 1945. The latest covers 1937-38, the years of the German annexation of Austria, the forging of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, and Munich. Like the first, it packs no great historical surprises, but sketches in a lively picture...

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