Even in 1937, by which time it was clear how bad Hitler’s version of fascism was, if not Mussolini’s, Churchill wrote an article on the Spanish Civil War for the American weekly magazine Collier’s entitled ‘The Infernal Twins’ in which he branded the ‘Nazi creed and the communist creed’ as ‘godless religions’. But still he could not resist heaping praise on Mussolini for ‘his extraordinary qualities of statesmanship, his magnificent courage and audacity, his untiring energy, his resolute will, his sure grasp of the possible.’