The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic, By Henry Buckley

This eyewitness account was first published in 1940, but most copies were destroyed during the Blitz, and it is republished only now. Buckley was Daily Telegraph correspondent in Spain from 1929 to 1939 and earned a reputation for scrupulous adherence to the truth. The great value of his book is that it is an objective picture of perhaps the most important decade in contemporary Spanish history. Buckley's perceptive judgments of the main political and military figures of the time greatly influenced later historians. "La Pasionaria" enthralled him, and he greatly admired the wartime socialist prime minister Negrín (especially for his humaneness), but other republican leaders' deficiencies are unerringly exposed. During the civil war he visited every front, at great personal risk, and to his fellow correspondent Ernest Hemmingway he was "a lion of courage". Anyone wishing to understand modern Spain should read this superb account, written with clarity, compassion and insight by one who was there.