Nicholas Burgess Farrell

Nicholas Burgess Farrell (born 2 October 1958) is an English journalist and the author of Mussolini: A New Life.

Early life

Farrell was born in London, on 2 October 1958. He attended The King's School, Canterbury, and studied history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, earning his B.A. on 20 June 1980. He completed his apprenticeship and his National Certificate Examination exam in October 1984.^{[citation needed]}

Career

Farrell worked as journalist for the Sunday Telegraph from 1987 to 1996, later moving to The Spectator from April 1996 to July 1998. He then moved to Forlì, Italy, married an Italian woman and joined the Italian journalist association, at first working for the local newspaper La voce di Romagna and later for the national publication Libero.^[1]

Farrell's most famous article is a 2003 interview with Silvio Berlusconi for The Spectator, where the Italian prime minister made statements which sparked criticism in Italy.^[2][3]

Today, he writes mainly for Libero newspaper, and since 2024 also writes the "Dolce vita" column in The Spectator, where he reports on local goings-on in his adopted home of Ravenna.^[4]

His 2003 book, Mussolini: A New Life, described Benito Mussolini as an unfairly maligned leader whose "charisma" and Machiavellian adroitness were "phenomenal"; it was acclaimed by British novelist and academic Tim Parks as a "welcome" revisionist biography.^[5] It was criticized by Tobias Jones of The Guardian, who summarized it by saying that its "basic thesis is that Mussolini deserves his place in the pantheon of great men and that fascism wasn't so bad after all".^[6]