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Inspired by the Spanish Civil War…

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Today my beady history-spy eye was rewarded for its daily scour of the news sites with this interesting nugget of information: National Archives files have been released (and are free to download) detailing the names of 4,000 Britons who in the 1930s went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War – read more here…

What it is that compels people to go to war, and in particular to enter a foreign war the outcome of which would, arguably, have little or no direct impact on one’s life if one did not travel to it, has long held a fascination for me – and it seems, for writers from the 1930s to the present day. During the war itself, writers were attracted to Spain like bees around a honey-pot. Ernest Hemingway and W.H. Auden visited, reported and propagandised; Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) is one of the 4,000 Britons recorded by MI5 as having joined up for the fight (he later recorded his experiences in Homage to Catalonia); and the Spanish Civil War and its legacy has hardly loosened its grip on popular culture ever since, with C.J. Sansom’s Winter in Madrid springing most readily to mind as a recent bestseller on the theme of the consequences of civil war.

And if the topic is of interest to you there will soon be a new addition to the ranks of Brits abroad in divided Spain: the second book in Jack Ludlow’s Roads to War trilogy, A Broken Land (out Sept 2011), sees ex-British army officer Cal Jardine in Barcelona in 1936 as fighting breaks out, with only a band of untrained yet ideological British athletes by his side…
(To find out how Cal ended up there, you can read the first in the series, The Burning Sky which is ready and available now.)

Georgina Phipps, Editorial Administrator

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