Christopher Duggan

Logo for Cambridge Core from Cambridge University Press. Click to return to homepage. Logo for Cambridge Core from Cambridge University Press. Click to return to homepage. Christopher was born in Petts Wood, a suburb of South East London, on 4 November 1957. His father was a ship broker and his mother a nurse who later trained as a social worker. The second of three siblings, he attended Dulwich College and Westminster before reading History at Merton College, Oxford. His interest in Italy, initially for the Medieval period, began in his teens and he travelled in the country both before and after his undergraduate degree. The encounter with the great Italian historian Denis Mack Smith, who would supervise his Oxford D.Phil, was decisive in shifting his focus to modern history. Mack Smith had authored with Moses Finlay a history of Sicily and Christopher too would develop a keen interest in the island’s chequered past. The topic of his thesis, Fascism’s struggle against the Mafia, made ample use of the papers of Mussolini’s ‘iron prefect’, Cesare Mori. The very first line of the resulting book (published by Rubettino in 1987, two years ahead of the English version, which would be published by Yale with the title Fascism and the Mafia ) asserted the intensely controversial notion that the Mafia was an idea rather than an organisation. The book was reviewed in the Corriere della Sera by the Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia, who employed its central idea to support his idiosyncratic stand against the so-called ‘professionals of anti-Mafia’. Although Duggan’s thesis was later undermined by the revelations of the repentant mafioso Tommaso Buscetta, the debate brought him early renown. Rubettino published a new edition of the book, which included Sciascia’s review, in 2007. Christopher was elected to a prize fellowship at his supervisor’s college, All Souls, in 1985 and the college would remain important to him. In 1987, he and his wife Jennifer were married in the college chapel, where their two children would be baptised and where his memorial service was also held on 12 December. He would return as a visiting fellow on two occasions, most recently in 2015. Although Oxford would always figure in his life, his entire teaching career was spent at Reading, where he was appointed to a lectureship in history in the Department of Italian Studies in 1987. He would soon rise to Reader and later Professor, before moving to the Department of History in 2013. For many years, Reading was the leading centre of Italian studies in the UK. It boasted a large Italian Studies department, whose members would include the renowned linguist Giulio Lepschy. Two distinguished historians of Italy, Stuart Woolf and Paul Corner, had held Christopher’s post before him. Percy Allum was a member of the Politics Department, while Adrian Lyttelton, Richard Bellamy, Richard Bosworth, David Laven and Linda Risso were attached to History for shorter or longer periods. Over the years, Christopher organised numerous seminars and events there, some of them under the auspices of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Italian Society. These included conferences on Italy and the Cold War and on the 1948 elections. The question of Italy’s unresolved relationship with its Fascist past was a subject about which Christopher came to care deeply and which he approached from a moral as well as a political point of view. His book Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Bodley Head, 2012) was conceived and mostly written during the Mussolini project. Drawing on the letters people wrote to the dictator over the course of his rule and hundreds of diaries, some of them published, others unpublished texts written by ordinary Italians which had been deposited years later in the national diary archive in Pieve Santo Stefano, Duggan was able to offer a particular insight into the nature and extent of ordinary Italians’ support for Mussolini and his regime. The book