What is fascism? It's a simple question to ask but a difficult one to answer. It's a bit like pornography in that respect, and like porn, we all know it when we see it even if we can't come up with a precise definition. In many books the question is answered by walking through a time-line, pointing out this or that feature of fascism at particular times and in particular faces. Inevitably this leads not to an understanding of fascism but to a collection of features that might or might not be useful in the present day.

Richard Griffiths, in this slim little book, points out that what we are generally looking back at fascism with hind-sight. What is clear now may not have been clear then; the understanding of the people involved at that time will be very different to our understanding fifty or sixty years later.

Griffiths, to his great credit, is not overly fixated with Nazism and the Hitler cult. Fascism was, (and remains today), a much broader church which encompassed numerous competing strands and philosophies. It drew its sources and supporters both from the traditional Right, particularly in France, and from the radical Left. To illustrate this Griffiths devotes considerable attention to the Action Francais, as well as to the more obvious examples of Italian Fascism.

It is clear that to view fascism as simply a Right-wing tendency is to be dangerously simplistic. Fascism is not simply the far-Right of the Tory or Republican parties, though there are more than enough fascists there. Nor should we simply dismiss fascism's 'Left-wing' as simply a pose to confuse and win over the working classes. Historically fascism was as much a leftist movement as a rightist one, there can be no denying that. We cannot even dismiss fascism as a leftist movement married to a racist world-view, as many fascist and proto-fascist groups and individuals were clearly not racists.

As Griffiths makes clear, the threat of fascism comes today not from fragmented groups of Hitler fetishists but from clean-suited and respectable politicians like Jorg Haider. In the UK the Euro-nationalist BNP has been stripped of any sign of its fascist roots. Once more fascism is re-discovering its 'left-wing'. The danger is that we have an anti-fascist movement that is so far behind, and so lacking any understanding of the ideologies of its enemies, that we are blind-sided in the way that anti-fascists have been right across Europe.

There are numerous single-volume introductions to fascism, but this is one of the better ones.