THE ITALIAN CHARACTER
SIR,—I assume that Mr. T. V. Gozzer is Italian. If he is not, then the fact that he stumbles into the wildest assumptions about myself, and the " decadent " circles in Rome in which I am reputed to have moved, serves only to show' how he shares the Italians' difficulty in preventing their emotions from running away with their reason and how easy it is for the foreigner to see them rather more "intus et. in cute" than they can themselves! When Mr. Gozzer is in a less emotional mood and events have helped him to adjust his sense of perspective, he may be interested to hear that I was neither a foreign correspondent nor a war correspondent in Italy, that I was never a member of the "Circolo della caccia" set, that I was very much in the North of Italy when it fell, that I have information about Partisan activities generally, from Rome up, more global than he perhaps suspects, not all of which points to the self-sacri- ficing heroism which both he and I know some Partisans to have dis- played, that all this does not necessarily make me unfriendly towards the Italians, and to be dubbed thus, merely because some home truths are spoken, only proves how imperfect the mind of man can be.—Yours
Thurlow Road, N.W. 3.
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