The life of the complex, ruthless adversary of General Franco, whose life spanned much of Spain’s turbulence in the 20th century.From 1939 to 1975, the Spanish Communist Party, effectively lead for two decades by Santiago Carrillo, was the most determined opponent of General Franco’s Nationalist regime. Admired by many on the left as a revolutionary and a pillar of the anti-Franco struggle and hated by others as a Stalinist gravedigger of the revolution, Santiago Carrillo was arguably the...
Love, war, duty, faith, betrayal and belief – a revolutionary new view of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes and experiences of the women who endured it, by the greatest historian of Spain: ‘Passionate and deeply moving… when Preston writes about these women, you feel as if you are in their company.’ Scotland on Sunday‘Four extraordinary women whose personal histories should dispel any illusions that the Spanish Civil War was an all-male war…Written with a shrewd eye and a sure touch, the...
Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the Caudillo of Spain from the Nationalists' brutal, Fascist-sponsored victory over the Republican government in the Spanish Civil War until his quiet death in 1975, is the subject of this book.The biography presents a mass of new and unknown material about its subject, the fruits of research in the archives of six countries and a plethora of interviews with key figures. Paul Preston is the author of «The Triumph of Democracy in Spain» and «The Spanish Civil War...
A powerful biography of Spain’s great king, Juan Carlos, by the pre-eminent writer on 20th-century Spanish history.There are two central mysteries in the life of Juan Carlos, one personal, the other political.The first is the apparent serenity with which he accepted that his father had surrendered him, to all intents and purposes, into the safekeeping of the Franco regime. In any normal family, this would have been considered a kind of cruelty or, at the very least, baleful negligence. But a...