Nicholas Burgess Farrell

Nicholas Burgess Farrell (born 2 October 1958) is a British journalist working as a columnist for The Spectator. After starting his career in England at The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator, he moved to Italy, where he wrote among others for La Voce di Romagna, Libero, and Il Giornale. In Italy, Farrell is best known for his 2003 interview with Silvio Berlusconi, the then prime minister of Italy. According to Farrell, Berlusconi stated that the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini never killed anyone and that he was a benevolent dictator. Berlusconi later said that his words had been manipulated by Farrell, who stood by his reporting; the interview and other controversial statements by Berlusconi about the Italian judiciary came close to cause an institutional crisis.

During his career, Farrell's columns at Libero earned him both supporters and critics as they often aroused controversy. He also wrote several books. In 2003, Farrell wrote Mussolini: A New Life, an historical revisionist biography of Mussolini that attracted mixed-to-negative reviews; it was translated and re-published in multiple languages. In 2013, he wrote another book about Mussolini, this time in Italian, where he promoted the fringe theory that fascism and Nazism were left-wing rather than far-right. Farrell continued to work at The Spectator, where he interviewed future prime minister Giorgia Meloni in 2022 and began writing "Dolce vita" columns in 2024, reporting on local goings-on from Ravenna in his adopted home of Emilia-Romagna, having lived in the Italian region since 1998.