The Red Brigades

A sober, painstaking corrective to wild notions that have the group as the catspaw of the CIA, the Rothschilds or Italy’s secret services – James Owen * The Times *John Foot’s history of the Red Brigades is as comprehensive a study as you will find, and it should be the final one… Foot has carried out an immense amount of research and provides an extraordinary quantity of detail – Simon Gaul * Literary Review *John Foot offers a deeply researched and powerfully written account of one of the darkest chapters in Italian history. Capturing the spirit of this troubled and turbulent era, he traces the personal journeys, political theories and cultural forces that radicalised a generation. An illuminating read that makes a major contribution to the history of political violence and the legacies of 1968 – Ross King, author of BRUNELLESCHI’S DOMEIf John Foot’s The Red Brigades were not so clear-eyed, well-documented and humane, the story it tells would scarcely be believable. A small group of misfits managed to bring Italy’s courts to a grinding halt and shake democracy to its foundations. Foot deploys previously unstudied material to reconstruct the Red Brigades’ woolly ideology, their cult of violence, their tactics, and the escalating horror of their actions. He is pitiless in exposing how intellectuals and ordinary citizens alike acquiesced to the Red Brigades’ reign of terror, and how a generation of journalists failed to question the way victims were dehumanised. A compelling and sobering read – John Dickie, author of MAFIA REPUBLICFoot’s magisterial account of Italy’s communist radicals matches its detailed scholarship with gripping prose … He gives an utterly fasincating insight into how these murderous purveyors of odious claptrap were allowed the clout they had. There is never an excuse for terrorism, which perhaps is the most important thing this superb book teaches us – Simon Heffer * The Telegraph *A grimly absorbing history of the Red Brigades … In superbly researched pages he considers the hydra-headed conspiracy theories that surrounded the BR’s attempts to bring down the Italian state… As Foot points out in this excellent book, the story of the BR ultimately amounts to “a national tragedy” – Ian Thomson * Financial Times *

John Foot is the author of nine books, including Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism and The Archipelago: Italy since 1945. Eight of his books have been translated into Italian. He has written for the Guardian, Independent on Sunday, London Review of Books and the TLS, and he is a regular contributor to the Italian magazine Internazionale. He has appeared in a number of TV documentaries and on national and local radio. He is Professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Bristol, and was awarded the British Academy’s prestigious Serena Medal in 2019 for his ‘path-breaking’ work in Italian history. He lives in Bristol with his partner and daughter.