This is history at its fascinating best. Smartly researched and very well written, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini takes the little known story about on attempt on il Duce's life and extends it to cover so many other deeply interesting aspects of 20th century European history. In April 1926, the Hon. Violet Gibson, a mentally fragile Anglo-Irish aristocrat, fired a revolver at the head of Benito Mussolini from a foot away; she missed, only taking a divot out of his nose. A minor event, but Saunders ties it in with the story of the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland, Italian politics, the practice of psychiatry, and much else. Gibson herself remains, as she was in life, a bit of a blur, but that is certainly no fault of the author who uses fresh documents to track what was a tragic arc of a life unfulfilled. And there is no better brief look at the tragedy that the odious Mussolini rained down on Italy.