Ernest Hemingway on Benito Mussolini

“Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff.”

“The Fascist dictator had announced that he would receive the press. Everybody came. We all crowded into the room. Mussolini sat at his desk reading a book.… Mentally he was already reading the lines of the two thousand newspapers served by the two hundred correspondents. "As we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up from the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration, etc." I tip-toed over behind him to see what the book was that he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary—held upside down.”