Salazar

‘Certain information and insight’, writes Tom Gallagher in the introduction to his book, ‘could have been gleaned by carrying out intensive work’ in the Salazar papers, stored in the Portuguese National Archive. This is an understatement. Constrained by the need to take advantage of the fiftieth anniversary of Salazar’s death, the author has produced a book which falls between two stools: it is neither an extended personal reflection on recent Portuguese history (an Interpretation, reprising the unusual title of his 1983 book on the topic) nor a more thorough academic biography which engages meaningfully with the relevant historiography and primary sources. Salazar, in fairness, is notoriously hard to define and categorise. Moreover, any attempt to do so is made more difficult, at least in Portugal, by entrenched political divisions within an academic milieu that, since the April 1974 revolution, has been staffed in part by former opponents of his

Dictator · Political science · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Psychology