Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the Elon Musk of the early 20th century, combining a joy in technological innovation with an appetite for illiberal politics. Where Musk builds rockets, Marinetti celebrated those shiny new inventions, the aeroplane and the motor car. The Futurist Manifesto, which he wrote when the movement existed only in his head, begins with a rhapsodic account of a fast drive that ends in a crash, which delights him more than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the famous Greek sculpture in the Louvre. Machines, he believes, make all previous art irrelevant. Futurism will hymn the hard new beauty....