ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Jonathan Keates, David Jenkins, Rupert Christiansen and—most especially—my brother James Hughes-Hallett, for reading and commenting on early drafts of this book. Thanks to the numerous people with whom I’ve talked about d’Annunzio and related topics over the past eight years: those conversations helped to focus my ideas and set me off on new lines of enquiry. I’m especially grateful to Mladen Urem, whose help in the archives made my visit to Rijeka so fruitful and who introduced me to Igor Zicˇ. The two of them made it possible for me to be the first of d’Annunzio’s biographers to write an account of d’Annunzio’s Fiume which includes the Croatian view of that episode. Thanks to the London Library for entrusting their beautiful early editions of d’Annunzio’s works to me.

Thanks to everyone involved in the book’s publication: my agent Felicity Rubinstein; my publisher Nicholas Pearson and everyone else at Fourth Estate; Andrew Miller and his colleagues at Knopf.

Thanks as well to Jayne Hanks, without whose remarkable kindness and devotion to my family this book could never have been written.

Thanks to Mary and Lettice for the immense pleasure of their company. Thanks and much love to Dan.