The Red Brigades
The Terrorists who Brought Italy to its Knees
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping basket is already at capacity.
Add to cart failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
New to Audible Prime Member exclusive: 2 credits with free trial
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks
Download titles to your library and listen offline
₹199.00 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.
The Red Brigades
Narrated by:
Mark Meadows
Buy Now for ₹670.93
-
Narrated by:
-
Mark Meadows
-
Written by:
-
John Foot
'A compelling and sobering read' JOHN DICKIE
'Deeply researched and powerfully written' ROSS KING
The explosive story of the terrorist group who brought Italy to a standstill in the 1970s.
In March 1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, murdering his bodyguards. For nearly two months, they held him hostage while a shocked world looked on, before eventually killing him and dumping his body in the middle of Rome.
But who were this terrorist group? What did they want? And how did they continue to operate for almost twenty years, terrifying a nation from 1970 to 1988? In John Foot’s remarkable new book, we learn how they became the most formidable left-wing terrorist organisation in post-war Western Europe.
Drawing their support from the student protest movements of the 1960s, activists and workers radicalised by the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969, the Red Brigades were inspired by terrorist groups from across the world, especially in Latin America. They recognised no rules and authority other than their own, and launched a campaign of murder, kidnap, kneecapping and intimidation that paralysed Italy’s justice system and reshaped the political landscape. For a time, they were admired as freedom fighters by the Italian left and commemorated as martyrs.
Through meticulous research, Foot uncovers the true story behind the myths that have grown around the Red Brigades, highlighting the human costs of their actions, as well as their impact on Italian society. He explains how the contradictions inherent in their actions eventually led to their downfall in a series of high-profile mass trials. The Red Brigades sheds new light on the shadowy world of the brigatisti, and highlights their legacy of conspiracy, distrust and bitterness that still lingers in Italy to this day.©2023 John Foot (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c
Critic Reviews
A sober, painstaking corrective to wild notions that have the group as the catspaw of the CIA, the Rothschilds or Italy’s secret services (James Owen)
Foot's magisterial account of Italy's communist radicals matches its detailed scholarship with gripping prose ... He gives an utterly fasincating insight into how these murderous purveyors of odious claptrap were allowed the clout they had. There is never an excuse for terrorism, which perhaps is the most important thing this superb book teaches us (Simon Heffer)
John Foot’s history of the Red Brigades is as comprehensive a study as you will find, and it should be the final one… Foot has carried out an immense amount of research and provides an extraordinary quantity of detail (Simon Gaul)
John Foot offers a deeply researched and powerfully written account of one of the darkest chapters in Italian history. Capturing the spirit of this troubled and turbulent era, he traces the personal journeys, political theories and cultural forces that radicalised a generation. An illuminating read that makes a major contribution to the history of political violence and the legacies of 1968 (Ross King, author of BRUNELLESCHI'S DOME)
If John Foot’s The Red Brigades were not so clear-eyed, well-documented and humane, the story it tells would scarcely be believable. A small group of misfits managed to bring Italy’s courts to a grinding halt and shake democracy to its foundations. Foot deploys previously unstudied material to reconstruct the Red Brigades’ woolly ideology, their cult of violence, their tactics, and the escalating horror of their actions. He is pitiless in exposing how intellectuals and ordinary citizens alike acquiesced to the Red Brigades’ reign of terror, and how a generation of journalists failed to question the way victims were dehumanised. A compelling and sobering read (John Dickie, author of MAFIA REPUBLIC)
A grimly absorbing history of the Red Brigades … In superbly researched pages he considers the hydra-headed conspiracy theories that surrounded the BR’s attempts to bring down the Italian state… As Foot points out in this excellent book, the story of the BR ultimately amounts to “a national tragedy" (Ian Thomson)
Plenty of students are bolshy; few of them, luckily, graduate to robbing banks and killing their prime minister. Foot’s account of the Brigate Rosse, the communist radicals who terrorised 1970s Italy, sets its detailed scholarship in taut and gripping prose
A comprehensive account of the far-left radical organisation whose armed struggle haunted Italy throughout the 1970s and 1980s ... Foot narrates the history of the BR accessibly while avoiding a deep analysis of the political theories and ideology underpinning their actions, focusing instead on the lives of the protagonists (Gigliola Sulis)
No reviews yet