Mark Mazower

Around noon on 16 August 1943, Dimitri Apostolou, a young Greek peasant, returned to his home village of Komeno in north-west Greece. German troops had just pulled out after a raid lasting some seven hours. In the charred ruins of the houses timbers were still burning. Corpses had begun to swell in the heat. The belly of one woman had been slit open, and a chicken had begun to drag her entrails along the road. Shortly after he saw this, Apostolou fainted.

It was not always easy being a Fascist prophet in interwar Europe. The local electorate seemed deaf to one’s warnings and strangely faithful to old, uncharismatic Conservatives or stolid Labour leaders. Mussolini and Hitler were exhilarating examples of success, but they seemed to scare off as many potential recruits to the cause as they attracted. Oswald Mosley was only one of the numerous would-be saviours of the Right to suffer by such association; Léon Degrelle in Belgium was another. Without an army behind them, most Fascists badly needed fate to lend them a hand in one way or another. Ioannis Metaxas was a Parliamentary failure in Greece before being parachuted into power at the whim of an authoritarian monarch, while only the Second World War and a German invasion rescued the Croatian Fascist Ante Pavelic from the monotony of exile and enabled him to attain power in Zagreb.

Last October James Rogan, a Republican congressman from California, and manager of the impeachment campaign against Clinton, faced the prospect of a tight re-election battle. His district had been targeted by the Democrats. Crucial to the outcome was the largest concentration of Armenian Americans in the US. To garner their 23,000 votes, Rogan – whose only-ever excursion outside the...

‘Live your myth in Greece,’ the Greek National Tourism Office urges us. This summer’s posters feature a young couple, children running along the beach behind them, while an anonymous columned temple hovers implausibly in the Aegean haze. Greece, it seems, has no history except ancient history. In Turkey, too, you can swim in the morning, and climb up to the theatre of...