The publisher who blew himself up

In Italy, conspiracy theories abound; the

Feltrinelli, a celebrity gauchiste, was hated by a variety of neo-Blackshirts and gangland entrepreneurs. He was friendly with Fidel Castro, had consorted with the Red Brigades, and posed for Vogue Uomo in an otter-skin cape and a busby. Now Feltrinelli had blown himself up while trying to detonate a Milanese electricity pylon. True or false? His death spawned a variety of hydra-headed conspiracy theories; it remains one of the great Italian scandals.

Thirty years on, the tycoon's son Carlo Feltrinelli has written a marvellous biography of his father. The book sets out to scotch the " behindologists" and set the record straight - Feltrinelli did blow himself up, unfortunately, but drastic situations impel people to drastic acts.

The publisher had died at the height of Italy's "strategy of tension"-when closet fascists allegedly connived with cabinet ministers and secret-service chiefs to implicate the Left in acts of terrorism. The intention was to create such fear and instability that Italians would clamour again for an authoritarian leader.

Feltrinelli was obsessed by the possibility of a Right-wing coup, and had reason to fear for his life. As a prominent Leftist he had been blamed by the far-Right for the bomb outrage which killed 16 bystanders in Milan's Piazza Fontana in 1969. He went into hiding for a year and saw little of his adored 10-year-old son, Carlo. On the day of his death, pathetically, he had planned to emerge from hibernation. Instead he died a squalid terrorist. Feltrinelli would merely be a chump had he not been such a great publisher. He made his name in 1957 when, in the teeth of opposition from the Soviet authorities, he published Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago. A year later he issued Giuseppe di Lampedusa's exquisite Sicilian novel The Leopard. These were scarcely Left-wing works, quite the opposite, but Feltrinelli was not a Communist party hardliner. Anyway, he championed good literature.

He had an eye for photography, too, and smuggled out of Cuba the now famous image of Che Guevara with saintly eyes and straggly black hair. That picture appeared on the walls of 1960s student bedsits more dependably than damp and Warhol's Monroe, and has become a voguish fashion icon again.

In his son Carlo's account, Feltrinelli was not really a Communist or Marxist, but a patrician utopian and idealist. In Havana in 1965 he had played basketball with Fidel and talked of sugar cane turnover, when most tourists would want to whoop it up with dancing girls in the Hotel Nacional. Feltrinelli was also an aficionado of Citroën cars and a keen yachtsman, on one occasion colliding with David Niven's sloop. As the Sixties progressed, he aimed to bring Cuban revolutionary tactics to Italy and certainly he looked the part in his thick-frame glasses and smouldering cigars. By the time Feltrinelli blew himself up, Italy was reeling from squalid State reprisals and Molotov explos ions. Disillusioned by his country's Rightward swing, he hoped to give the Blackshirts a taste of their own medicine by turning to violence to subvert the status quo. The revolution never came.

Senior Service (incidentally this was Feltrinelli's favourite cigarette brand) is a transfixingly readable amalgam of memoir and history, which memorably captures the spirit of Italy's '68, as well as the hopes and follies of a generation.

Carlo Feltrinelli now runs his father's publishing house and the chain of stylish Feltrinelli bookshops across Italy. His book is an essential reference as well as an act of filial devotion.