In May 1945, two Italian communist partisans banged on the door of Ezra Pound’s home near Rapallo and took him away. He went quietly, pausing to pocket some books for company: a volume of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary.
Pound had been living in Italy for 20 years but, like PG Wodehouse in Berlin, had disgraced himself over the wartime airwaves. From January 1941, he had given 200 radio talks from Rome, but they were not benign ramblings like Wodehouse’s. Pound the eminent poet, the architect of modernism, the man who had edited TS Eliot’s The Waste Land into publishable shape, had condemned the allied forces, vigorously damned the “kikes” and praised the Axis powers.
In July 1943, the US Department for Justice had had
