The 48-year-old Italian journalist Giovanni Dozzini has just held a mirror up to his country. He has done so following a quote from Bertolt Brecht: “Let others speak of their shame; I speak of my own”. Italy's shame is its savage foreign policy, which Dozzini has now rescued from oblivion with Maiorca (Fandango Libri), still awaiting translation into Catalan and Spanish. The book, a hybrid between essay and fiction written in the first person, recounts the bombings of Barcelona that Mussolini's air force perpetrated from Mallorca, half an hour away by flight, throughout the entire Civil War.