Samuel Johnson Prize 2013: Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a revelation One of the many pleasures of my job is that it pushes you beyond your preconceptions: on the face of it, I thought a book about an almost forgotten Italian "poet, seducer and preacher of war" would be enough to cure insomnia. Yet when I read the book in order to interview its author, I could barely put down Lucy Hughes-Hallett's The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio. It's as gripping a page turner as the most sensationalist novel - and infinitely more rewarding. The judges of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction obviously agree. In beating off more fancied front-runners such as Charles Moore's revealing official biography of Margaret Thatcher, Charlotte Higgins's penetrating account of the influence of the Romans on Britain, and William Dalrymple's riveting history of the first Afghan war, Hughes-Hallett has struck a blow for the obscure as a suitable subject for study. Her achievement is all the more astonishing since d'Annunzio, who lived from 1863 to 1938, is repellent in almost every way. He was a reckless self-publicist, a talent first revealed when he announced his own death in a riding accident at the age of 17, in order to draw attention to the republication of his first - already fantastically successful - book of poems. He was a legendary womaniser, despite being described by one courtesan as "a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath and the manners of a mountebank." He treated women vilely, driving them to ruin and suicidal despair, and transforming his sexual exploits into a series of popular novels which one critic complained "smelt of sperm." He needed to write the novels because he was such a spendthrift, always a few steps ahead of his creditors. But for all this, he was a charismatic and influential public figure, using his influence to drum up support for war, sending young men to slaughter with a callous disregard for the effects of violence and a poetic belief in its power. By the end of the First World War, he had established himself as a hero and lost an eye; disgusted by what he called "the stench of peace," he led a raggle-taggle army to seize the port of Fiume. There he made himself a dictator, and for well over a year presided over a population of nationalist extremists, drug-addled and excitable, who experimented with the poisonous fascist ideology that would ultimately propel Mussolini to power. It is an amazing story. But what makes The Pike such a terrific book is the way in which Hughes-Hallett tells the tale with the vivid narrative thrust of a novel - but without some fiction's instinctive sympathy for its central player. She reserves judgment, letting d'Annunzio speak for himself, preserving her equilibrium in the face of his excess. You know she does not approve of his political views, but she never condemns him. The book is a revelation, an insight into a murky but significant segment of history, and a worthy winner of the prize.