Tia Glista at LitHub:
A squad of amateur fascists feast around a table at a busy restaurant, their eyes flicking from their meal toward a crowd across the room, and then to their de facto leader, a balding 35-year-old newspaper man. They practically hover above their chairs, panting, licking their lips, gripping their glasses of wine instead of drinking from them: they are poised for something else, and so they check in again with their boss, whose curt nod gives them assent to take action. They leap up, bludgeon the other men with batons and kick them repeatedly; a few days later, they perform a similar attack on the headquarters of the socialist newspaper L’Avanti, smashing their equipment, stabbing their workers, lighting people and things on fire. The year is 1919 and the man who leads the squadrismo is Benito Mussolini.
When watching Mussolini: Son of the Century, the new mini-series directed by Joe Wright and based on the 2018 novel by Antonio Scurati, it was not the fact of the violence that surprised me so much as the extent of its heedlessness—the open, unreserved character of the cruelty inflicted on others in public without remorse.
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