Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

Nicholas Burgess Farrell

British journalist (born 1958) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Remove ads

Nicholas Burgess Farrell (born 2 October 1958) is a British journalist working as a columnist for The Spectator. After starting his career in England at The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator, he moved to Italy, where he wrote for La Voce di Romagna and Libero. In Italy, Farrell is best known for his 2003 interview with Silvio Berlusconi, who at that time was in his second term as prime minister of Italy. According to Farrell, Berlusconi stated that the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini never killed anyone and that he was a benevolent dictator. Berlusconi later said that his words had been manipulated by Farrell, who stood by his reporting.

During his career, Farrell wrote several books. In 2003, he wrote Mussolini: A New Life, an historical revisionist biography of Mussolini that attracted mixed-to-negative receptions. In 2013, he published another book about Mussolini. In 2024, Farrell began writing "Dolce vita" columns in The Spectator, reporting on local goings-on from Ravenna in his adopted home of Emilia-Romagna, having lived in the Italian region since 1998.

Remove ads

Early life and career

Farrell was born in London on 2 October 1958.[1] He attended The King's School, Canterbury, and studied history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, earning his B.A. on 20 June 1980.[1] He completed his apprenticeship and earned the National Certificate in Newspaper Journalism following his National Certificate Examination exam in October 1984.[1] Farrell worked as journalist for the Telegraph Publishing Limited at The Sunday Telegraph from 1987 to 1996, later moving to The Spectator from April 1996 to July 1998.[1] In 2003, Farrell attracted international attention for his interview with Berlusconi, who was the then Italian prime minister.[2][3][4]

Remove ads

Interview with Silvio Berlusconi

Summarize
Perspective

In August 2003, Farrell had a two-hour interview with Berlusconi in his Sardinian palace in Porto Rotondo, alongside Boris Johnson, the then editor of The Spectator, where the then Italian prime minister made statements summarized or reported as "Mussolini wasn't that bad", including the claim that Saddam Hussein was worse than Mussolini as Berlusconi was discussing Iraq and that Italian judges were "mentally disturbed", that sparked criticism in Italy.[2][3] More specifically, in the second part of the interview that was published in The Spetcator and La Voce di Rimini, where Farrell worked as a editor,[5] after being asked by Farrell if Mussolini was a benevolent dictator, Berlusconi was quoted as saying: "Yes ... Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday in confinement."[4][6] This view, which was defended by some of Berlusconi's supporters within the context of a comparison to another dictator, is not supported by scholarly consensus, with one scholarly estimate being around one million deaths as a result of Mussolini's rule in Italy, Ethiopia, Lybia, and Yugoslavia.[4] Berlusconi was criticized for having apparently forgotten the murder of Giacomo Matteotti and Squadrismo violence,[2] and the opposition accused him of apology for fascism, which is a crime in Italy.[7]

The controversial statements came after Farrell and Johnson asked Berlusconi whether United States president George W. Bush and Tony Blair had told him that Iraq had weapons were capable of hitting the West in 45 minutes. Berlusconi said that he did not talk directly to them about this and that there was a major problem of the West's relations with the Muslim and Middle Eastern world, citing the lack of democracy and that they had known no other system than dictatorship, at which point Farrell interjected by saying: "Like Italy?"[2] Berlusconi told Farrell, "Let's leave it at that, it was a dictatorship much more...", at which point Farrell interjected, "Benevolent", while the prime minister's interpreter said, "or benign".[2] At this point, Berlusconi made the controversial statements about Mussolini, after which he said: "Aside from that, the discussion here becomes broader: we are facing a new world scenario. The West's opposition to the Warsaw Pact is over. Now the Russian Federation has decided, through Putin, to join the West; this is a great thing..."[2]

In the same interview, for which Farrell is best known in Italy, Berlusconi publicly swore the innocence of Marcello Dell'Utri, who at that time was charged for collusion with the Sicilian Mafia, describing him as a "Catholic, a believer, and a man of culture, with an outstanding family and a well-off father". He said that Dell'Utri was a victim of the "crazy communist judiciary", and that his only fault was of trusting people he did not know were notorious mafiosi, questioning the legitimacy of the crime of external complicity in mafia association (in Italian: concorso esterno in associazione mafiosa).[2] When the first excerpts from the two-part interview were published in Italy on the newspaper La Voce, Berlusconi stated that his words had been manipulated by Farrell, whom he described as a "criminal", that the interview had been a bunch of small talk with some friends, and that he was "a little tipsy" from drinking two bottles of champagne. Farrell denied the accusations and gave a summary of the conditions of the interview, stating that Berlusconi himself asked when and where the article was expected to be published, that the interview set-up took several weeks, and that the talk was recorded on tape. He denied any drinking of alcohol at the interview since only lemon tea was served at their table. Farrell ended his rebuttal by telling him to "be good" as the publication of the third part was ready.[8]

Remove ads

Columnist and editor

Summarize
Perspective

In 2007, Farrell joined the Italian Order of Journalists,[1] at first working for the local newspaper La Voce di Romagna.[9] He later worked for the national daily newspaper Libero,[10] where he promoted the fringe theory that fascism and Nazism were left-wing rather than far-right, writing in 2010: "The German National Socialists hated Jews because they were bankers and small businessmen, symbols of the hated capitalism. It's no coincidence that the anti-Semites masquerading as anti-Zionists are left-wing, and even today they hate Israel and flirt with Islamic fascists who subjugate men and women in the name of the state."[11] In November 2014, he wrote a letter to Antonio Socci, who claimed that the election of Pope Francis was invalid and criticized his homilies and pontificate for being too "communist". In response, Farrell stated as an anti-communist supporter of the pope, whose charisma reminded him of Pope John Paul II, that Socci should stop make such attacks on Francis.[12] Farrell continued to work for The Spectator. During the 2022 Italian general election campaign, Farrell had an interview on The Spectator with the Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni as she attempted to provide a more moderate and mainstream conservative image amid neo-fascist concerns as her party is an heir of the Italian Social Movement from which the party took the tricolour flame, which Meloni defended while denying of being a fascist.[13]

Works

Summarize
Perspective

Farrell's 2003 book Mussolini: A New Life, which was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson,[14] described 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.[15] 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".[16][17] Jones observed that Farrell's book was "a bit of a cut-and-paste job" of Renzo De Felice's biography of Mussolini; De Felice himself was often criticized as a revisionist historian whose biography of Mussolini was said to be near hagiographic.[17]

In his review of the book, Mark Simpson wrote in The Independent that Mussolini, after Ida Dalser (Mussolini's first wife), Rachele Mussolini (Mussolini's second wife), Clara Petacci (Mussolini's mistress), and Adolf Hitler (one of his first admirers), had found another "wife" in Farrell, who he said had "possessively proposed a new Mussolini" as a "prisoner of love", whose defects were transformed into virtues.[3][17] In The Daily Telegraph, popular historian Andrew Roberts criticized Farrell's statement that "Mussolini saved more Jews than Oskar Schindler" and that Mussolini was not antisemitic but anti-Jewish.[17] Despite the criticism, the book was popular enough to be translated into six languages.[10]

In 2010, Farrell had a diatribe with Marco Travaglio and Malcom Pagani about the alleged Mussolini diaries, which appeared to support his more sympathetic thesis in his 2003 book about Mussolini but were proven to be forgeries. Farrell had stated that noted British historian Denis Mack Smith told him that the diaries were true.[3] Mack Smith himself had a negative opinion on Farrell's book,[17] which depicted Mussolini as neither corrupt nor a tyrant, that he was not a reactionary and that he won power by consent rather than violence, and that he was not responsable for the assassination of Matteotti and other victims of fascism.[18] In a 2013 interview to promote his book Il compagno Mussolini: la metamorfosi di un giovane rivoluzionario (Comrade Mussolini: The Metamorphosis of a Young Revolutionary), co-written with Giancarlo Mazzuca,[19] Farrell reiterated his view about fascism being left-wing.[20][21]

Remove ads

Personal life

In 1998, Farrell moved to Italy in Emilia-Romagna,[10] more specifically in Predappio, a town he calls "the fascist Bethlehem", where Mussolini was born and buried, with a significant far-right following.[16][17] Farrell married an Italian woman with whom he has six children, aged 10 to 22 as of October 2025. In October 2025, Farrell wrote an article for The Spectator discussing his family's disagreement about the Gaza war and the related Gaza genocide. He wrote that his family supported the view that Israel was guilty of genocide and that the Meloni government and the prime minister were complicit in the genocide, while he is a supporter of Israel holding the view that "a country called Palestine does not exist", and three of his children took part at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Forlì. His 18-year old daughter wrote him a response that was published in The Spectator.[22]

Remove ads

Selected works

  • Farrell, Nicholas Burgess (2003). Mussolini: A New Life. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-81965-3. Archived from the original on 15 October 2025. Retrieved 15 October 2025 via Google Books.
  • Farrell, Nicholas (25 June 2003). "A chip off the old block?". The Independent. Archived from the original on 6 July 2022. Retrieved 15 October 2025.
  • Farrell, Nicholas Burgess; Mazzuca, Giancarlo (2013). Il compagno Mussolini: la metamorfosi di un giovane rivoluzionario (in Italian). Rubbettino. ISBN 978-88-498-3910-4. Retrieved 15 October 2025 via Google Books.
  • Farrell, Nicholas (10 August 2014). "The truth about La Dolce Vita". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 22 June 2024. Retrieved 15 October 2025.
  • Farrell, Nicholas (24 January 2020). "Salvini's plan to smash Italy's red wall". UnHerd. Archived from the original on 25 January 2020. Retrieved 15 October 2025.
  • Farrell, Nicholas (30 September 2021). "Is Silvio Berlusconi mad?". UnHerd. Archived from the original on 1 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2025.
  • Farrell, Nicholas (4 October 2025). "My Italian family believe Meloni is complicit in genocide". The Spectator. Retrieved 15 October 2025.{{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
Remove ads

References

Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads