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with rebirth. This, Mann claims, is an approach which does not clearly distinguish fascism from other forms of nationalism and ignores the fascist appetite for violence. While combative on definition, Mann is particularly concerned to explore who were the fascists. Too often, he suggests, social factors have been taken to be concerned with class. But while there are class components of fascist movements, we should give particular attention to other social characteristics, for instance, gender, generation and region. Fascists disproportionately were male, young and came from particular areas, and this neatly links back to Mann’s preferred definition. The nation-statism he highlights is crucial in securing support not only from ex-soldiers or inhabitants of embattled border-areas but those occupied in particular sectors of the economy, in which ownership by or identification with the nationstate was a central characteristic. Although focused on areas of inter-war Europe, this study is concerned with questions of fascism’s more enduring appeal, and while dismissing the suggestion that anti-immigration populists in France or elsewhere should be seen as fascists, it is anxious whether the rise of violent xenophobia in Eastern Europe or India might indicate possibilities for fascist revival. But while taking us into the present, Mann’s book is predominantly about six European countries and a quarter-century of their history, and it is here where its contribution must most be judged. This is a fascinating study that anyone concerned with fascism would benefit from reading. The evidence it brings to bear is testimony to the wide range of work that the author has consulted, and the argument he makes and the distinctions he draws between it and other approaches mark it as a significant new contribution to the unfortunately entitled fascist studies. But this is not to say that Mann has been wholly successful. In part, this is a result of the countries he has chosen and the questions he asks of them. Several of the chapters are not about fascists per se, but a national ‘Family of Authoritarians’, and in the Spanish case disturbingly little is said about the Fascist Falange given Mann’s concern both to describe the country’s political scene as a whole and to examine the different sub-types of the country’s right. But if there are problems of doing too much about particular political systems, and too little about particular fascisms, there is a greater problem. At first sight, Mann’s emphasis on nation-statism and transcendence bears a marked resemblance to what Roger Griffin has described as the new consensus view of fascism. As we have noted, he is determined to rebut such a claim, and in including paramilitarism in his definition, he is certainly seeing fascism differently from Griffin and other writers who can envisage an electoral or intellectual fascism and do not take blackjacks or castor oil to be integral to fascism. But to argue against an increasingly influential definition of fascism needs a far greater amount of space than Mann has chosen to give to it in this book. It also needs to be done with care, and certainly Mann’s suggestion that in not including violence in his definition, Griffin is guilty of sanitizing fascism, is not one that is calculated to take scholarly debate forward.