When Giorgia Meloni became Italy's first female PM in 2022, many commentators dubbed her the "far-right heir of Benito Mussolini", and claimed that she wanted "to dismantle democracy", said Nicholas Farrell in The Spectator .

Three years on, Italy remains a democracy, and Meloni's party, Fratelli d'Italia , is more popular than when she came to power – an "almost unheard of" feat for a governing party in the West today. Meloni 's memoir, "I Am Giorgia" – "already a bestseller in Italy" and now translated into English – describes how a "short, fat, sullen, bullied girl" from a single-parent family in Rome transformed herself into a prominent figure on the "largely male-dominated world stage".

There are some frustrating omissions: given Meloni's past membership of Italy's "long-dea

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