Alfa for sale. £600,000 ono

Harbouring an exaggerated affection for cars does not automatically make you a dictator; but it is striking how many dictators have been as unbalanced and wilfully self-indulgent about cars as they were about, say, foreign policy. Trotsky and Kamenev both shared a weakness for Rolls-Royces. The Shah of Iran had a garage full of cars to rival Elton John's. And Brezhnev loved American automobiles almost as much as he liked Swiss suits.

None of them, however, comes close to Benito Mussolini for shameless and unrestrained car lust. Not only was Italy's Duce a

crazed collector of cars, he was also a gifted racing driver who won many races (possibly because few rivals had the nerve to beat the commander-in-chief of the secret police) and, legend has it, even wrote about cars as a journalist in his twenties.

An Alfa Romeo commissioned by Mussolini in 1935 will go on sale at the H&H auction in Cheltenham in February. His 6C 2300 Pescara Spyder, built to special order, ran in the 1936 Mille Miglia in the hands of