Twenty years after writing his imagist "In a Station of the Metro", Pound, who was by then living in Italy, presented Mussolini with a copy of his XXX Cantos, to which the dictator said, “How amusing.”

But Pound must have made an impression, for nine years later, with the United States a full-patch member of the Second World War, Mussolini asked the poet if he might try his hand at radio.

Below is what you might have heard during an Ezra Pound broadcast (note the Gertrude Stein influence):

"Every man of common sense, including the odd British MP, knows that every man of common sense prefers Fascism to Communism, from the moment that he learns a few concrete facts about both of them."