Between the end of the Great War and the start of the Second World War, various Italians living in London, who for the most part had migrated there around the start of the twentieth century, started their own particular determined opposition to Fascism. Their initial aim was to counter Fascist monopolisation of London's Italian community, contesting control of the community's main associations, institutes and cultural bodies by the Fascio, which had been established in London in 1921. Subsequently, these anti-Fascists also sought contacts outside London's Little Italy, on the one hand with British political bodies and the British press, and on the other with anti-Fascists in other countries. While strong links were formed with the latter, British society showed only a muted interest. This is in part explained by the positive response to the Fascist experience by the Conservative press and various eminent British politicians, at least until the mid-1930s.

Studies on party institutionalisation commonly argue that parties with personalist leadership and weak organisation are unlikely to remain in power beyond leadership succession. In other words, these parties will rarely attain their own institutionalisation. From this perspective, the recent Italian political reality represents a conundrum. Three parties of this type – Northern League; Forza Italia; Italy of Values – confronted significant resignation issues concerning their leaders, but only the League, contrary to the theory, made a decisive step toward institutionalisation by removing its founding father and remaining an actor with national blackmail potential. This article addresses this challenge and provides a solution to this conundrum. In particular, the article demonstrates that an approach that considers both party factors and critical events is necessary to account fully for the variance of outcomes and, more generally, for party change.

The recent English translation of Caludio Pavone's book on the Italian civil war (1943–1945) represents an occasion to reconsider Resistance historiography and memory politics. This paper discusses Pavone's book and looks back on its genesis, while at the same time reflecting on its legacy. The aim is to offer some insight on the evolution of historiographic narratives concerning the Resistance and the civil war in the last decades.

The parasitic ichneumon fly, discovered by European natural philosophers in the seventeenth century, remained largely unstudied until it captured the attention of Enlightenment-era natural historians. Although this sudden surge of interest has been explained as an effort to understand the natural ‘evil’ of parasitism, the heyday of ichneumon studies was actually inspired by the political and agricultural context of late eighteenth-century Britain. British naturalists were captivated by this insect for reasons both philosophical and practical. In the providentially self-equilibrating qualities of ‘natural’ ichneumon economies, they saw solutions to political problems of famine, dearth, national wealth, governance and excess population, in addition to finding reassurance that Enlightened confidence in nature's inherent stability and fruitfulness was not unfounded.