Books about the Spanish Civil War have usually fallen into three categories: serious marxist analyses of the situation; contemporary accounts written from a C.P. point of view, including a hefty percentage of "joy it was..."; weapons in the cold war that were lovingly prepared by western intellectuals to make people realise that ideas lead to revolutions, that revolutions end in tyranny and that it is therefore safer to proclaim an end to ideology.
Stanley Weintraub's book escapes from the usual categories. He has traced, sympathetically, the involvement of the intellectuals in the Spanish Civil War. His method is reportage; poems, prose and letters of those involved are quoted at length. In this way all three tendencies are allowed to appear and some idea is given of the complexity of response to the messy, heroic and betrayed struggle that was Spain; from André Marty's "sanatorium" at Alcala de Henares, where the Russian firing squads worked overtime to liquidate the trotskyists and anarchists, to the Catalonian villages where they solemnly abolished money; from tragic and dedicated figures like Cornford and Caldwell to Errol Flynn over for a quick publicity stunt; the book manages to encompass all this, This book is worth buying.
R. Kirk
* "The Last Great Cause", published by W.H. Allen