'Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain,' says Australian historian Robert Bosworth in his acclaimed study Mussolini's Italy, which examines how former newspaper editor Benito Mussolini controlled Italy for more than 20 years. This is a follow-on from Bosworth's 2002 biography Mussolini, which first advanced his thesis that fascism was 'more the expression of collective social forces than the work of one man', as The New York Times puts it. In Mussolini's Italy, Bosworth shows how Mussolini tried to control Italians and how they in turn adapted fascism to suit themselves. It tapped into resentment and thuggish social discontent in the early 1920s - much as Hitler's Nazism would do, even though Italy wasn't a totalitarian state - with the regime articulating racism beyond the Jews. Mussolini got his power from the companies and the people whose interests were best served by him having it. 'Fascism is nothing but bluff,' he said. The people didn't much care, until they got sent to war in water-soluble boots with ammunition that wouldn't fire.