Franco

Map best viewed on a tablet device.An account of the Spanish civil war which portrays the struggles of the war, as well as discussing the wider implications of the revolution in the Republican zone, the emergence of brutal dictatorship on the nationalist side and the extent to which the Spanish war prefigured World War II.No war in modern times has inflamed the passions of both ordinary people and intellectuals in the way that the conflict in Spain in 1936 did. The Spanish Civil War is burned...

A powerful and searing account of the destruction of Guernica by Hitler’s Condor League in April 1937 written by Paul Preston – foremost historian of 20th century Spain and best-selling and critically acclaimed author of The Spanish Holocaust.The destruction of Guernica seventy-five years ago, on 26 April 1937, is burned into European consciousness as the first time aerial bombardment wiped out an undefended civilian target in Europe. The events of that day have provoked more savage polemic than...

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...

No war in modern times has inflamed the passions of both ordinary people and intellectuals in the way that the conflict in Spain in 1936 did.The Spanish Civil War is burned into European consciousness, not simply because it prefigured the much larger world war that followed it, but because the intense manner of its prosecution was a harbinger of a new and horrific form of warfare that was universally dreaded. At the same time, the hopes awakened by the attempted social revolution in republican...

A brilliant portrait of the Spanish Civil War from our greatest historian of Spain. ‘Anyone interested in Spain will want this book.‘ Alan Massie, Daily TelegraphA bravura new interpretation of the course, causes and characters of the Spanish Civil War, still the twentieth century’s bloodiest internal conflict. Analysis of the Civil War has always focused on victors and vanquished, but what of those who eschewed the struggle, those who stood apart from the carnage and chaos? Was there a Third...

In this Samuel Johnson Prize short-listed work of meticulous scholarship, Paul Preston, the world’s foremost historian of 20th-century Spain, charts how and why Franco and his supporters set out to eliminate all ‘those who do not think as we do’ – some 200,000 innocent men, women and children across Spain.The remains of General Franco lie in an immense mausoleum near Madrid, built with the blood and sweat of 20,000 slave labourers. His enemies, however, met less exalted fates. In addition to...