In his latest book, Engineers of Human Souls: Four Writers Who Changed Twentieth Century Minds, author and former arts editor of New Scientist magazine, Simon Ings has focused on four writers: French nationalist Maurice Barre; Italian poet and muse for Mussolini’s fascism, Gabriele D’Annunzio; Maxim Gorky who was very close to Stalin; and Maoist writer Ding Ling.