Book Review - A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

 A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964

This is a handy little crib on the history of the Jewish people, rather than the Jewish faith. Of course, it can be difficult to separate the two; as Parkes writes in his introduction, "[t]he history of the Jews is the story of a people inextricably interwoven with that of a religion. Neither can be told apart from the other. It is obvious that there would be no story of Judaism if there were no Jews; but it is just as true that Jews would not have survived the long centuries of their total dispersion had there not been the cement of a religion moulded to their need either to transform or to tolerate the conditions of their corporate and individual lives."

Parkes' history shows a long tradition of a people trying as much as they can to accommodate themselves to the situation in which they existed at any one time. From the earliest days there were geographically diverse groups of people practicing the religion of Judaism, with more or less oppression from the powers of the time. There have only been very short periods of time when Jewish people have had the capacity to control their own polity - very early and very late in their history.

The story of the Jews after Classical times is one of interaction with both Christendom and Islam, and the changing fortunes of those relationships. Christendom very quickly began oppressing the Jews, as they saw them as a threat to the growth of their own religion. The Jews were, in Christian eyes, apostates, Christ-killers, and subverters of fellow Christians. Islam initially treated Jews much better than did Christians, but as the Muslim world shrunk in the face of Western Christian dominance of Europe and Africa, and Islam withdrew into itself, that relationship too became poisoned and died. During the secular age, rather than religious scares, the route of anti-Semitism runs along the lines of finance and conspiracy - the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi rantings about Jewish control of finance took the place of older tropes of Blood Libel and miscegenation.

Parkes explains how the Jews developed their faith and ideas in separation from each other - the Sephardic Spanish versus the Ashkenazi Central Europeans. While non-Jews were the people's biggest enemy, they were not averse to internecine conflict either. The destruction of the Temple and exclusion from Jerusalem meant that the old ways of Jewish worship had to change, through a "democratic" system of congregationalism, through to a "professional" structure of paid Rabbis. This is not gone into in great detail, but is fascinating to a non-Jewish reader such as myself.

The final section of the book deals with the horrors and hopes of the twentieth century - the Holocaust, and the creation of Israel. Parkes focusses on the British Mandate in Palestine, how something that began with such high hopes ended in disaster, with the British washing their hands (a la Pilate) of the problems they had created with a poorly thought-out plan to let Jews come back home. Written in 1964, this book doesn't cover much of the ongoing disaster that has come out of this recent history.

If you are a person who doesn't know much about Jewish history this book, although dated,  isn't the worst place to start.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Anarchists by Roderick Kedward

 The Anarchists: the Men who Shocked an Era by Roderick Kedward

London: Library of the 20th Century, 1971            ISBN 0356037215

I love this series, and the others like it such as the Pan/Ballantine History of World War II - every time I see one of these I buy it. Short, pithy histories of a concept or period of history (in this case, both), written (usually) by an academic, and profusely illustrated. They are a great introductory work on a particular topic.

Anarchism is a hard one to nail in such a format, but Roderick Kedward has done a good job to lay out the basics of the concepts and history of the movement. He explains the nature of Anarchism, emphasizing individual choice and the hatred of the idea of government. He begins with the great Russians Kropotkin and Bakunin and then describes in some detail the anarchist outrages in Europe and the ideological battle between the individualists and the anarcho-syndicalists. 

His focus is on Western Europe - France, Italy and Spain in particular, but also with mentions of Russia and England. This book was published in 1971, and Kedward implies that anarchism had died as a political movement since World War II as Europe moved to a welfare state. He doesn't really discuss the phenomenon of 1968, and of course this book was published way before the resurgence of anarchist ideas in our current century.

As a brief introduction to the concept and history of the Anarchist idea, this book isn't bad - I'm sure you could pick it up for less than the price of a cup of coffee, and it's much more fulfilling.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 by Victor Serge

 Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 by Victor Serge, translated and edited by Peter Sedgwick

London: Oxford University Press, 1967 (this translation first published 1963)

I have been meaning to read Victor Serge for many years - in my peregrinations through the literature of revolution and totalitarianism and the tortured history of the Twentieth Century his name crops up again and again (in fact it's generally accepted that he coined the word totalitarian). I've finally got around to his memoirs, and what a fascinating and depressing read they are.

Depressing in the sense that he catalogs in great detail the failure of Socialism in the first half of the 1900s, specifically the descent of the USSR into despotism and a police state, far from the hopes of those that fought the Revolution hoping for a worker's democracy.

Serge does not in this memoir really go into his personal life: he briefly describes his childhood in Belgium and France (his parents were exiled Russian socialists), and while we know from the book that he has a son, and that his first wife was eventually driven insane by the privations and persecutions Serge and his family suffered in Russia, they are the background to the wider story Serge wishes to tell.

While this is not a history of the Russian revolution, Civil War and times up until the Terror, it provides all the background information to such a history: wonderful pen-portraits of major and not so major figures in Russia during the 1920s, descriptions of the tightening grip of the Cheka on Russian society and government, and the increasingly difficult time to be weathered by those that did not absolutely conform to the Bolshevik line.

Serge never stopped fighting for the Socialism that he believed in - he went to Russia to help the worker's revolution, he joined with the Bolsheviks because he believed at the time that they were the only group that could deliver such a revolution. When the Bolsheviks went down the path of authoritarianism and repression Serge fought from within the system, as to his mind that was the only way he could make a difference.

He watched with dismay as the Bolshevik leaders consistently chose the path of repression over openness. Instead of worker's tribunals, the leadership chose unlawful detention. Instead of abolishing the death penalty, they chose to allow the Cheka to shoot people without trial or recourse to any mechanism for reprieve. Serge laments that the new regime had learnt from the Tsarist one, and continued many of the unjust activities of the past - as he writes "[t]he Russian Revolution, although led by men who were upright and intelligent, did not resolve this problem; the character of the masses had received, from the experience of despotism [i.e. under the Tsars], a fatal stamp whose effects were imprinted in the leaders themselves."

Eventually, Serge's opposition to such despotism made him a marked man, for "[o]ur great Marxists of Russia, nurtured on Science, would not admit any doubt concerning the dialectical conception of Nature - which is, however, no more than a hypothesis, and one difficult to sustain at that." Because Serge espoused this, he was hounded out of his positions, and sent into internal exile. He most probably would have been shot or died in a prison somewhere as happened to many of his friends, but because of his international fame, particularly in France where he was well-known as a novelist, he was eventually expelled from Russia.

That was not the end of his troubles - the Russians made it very hard for him anywhere he went in Europe. Pushed to the edges of the socialist movement, Serge just barely scraped by financially (although lack of money or the finer things of life never worried him), and when the Second World War came, he was forced to flee to Mexico, the only place that would take him. Although Trotsky (whom Serge often disagreed with) could not escape Stalin's vengeance in Mexico, Serge managed to spend his last years there in relative, if miserly, calm; writing this memoir before dying in 1947.

Serge's legacy is that of a true revolutionary socialist, and a clear thinker much in the mold of George Orwell. He was always working for the proletarians, and against the apparatchiks and place seekers. When he wrote this memoir he was hopeful that the War would finally bring about the socialism he was looking for - it didn't, but certainly, in the West at least, many people's lives have been improved by governments adopting some measures that alleviate the lot of the workers.

I finish this review with a quote that bears repeating again and again, for totalitarianism in all its forms continues to be a blight on the human race, and we need to keep fighting for freedom. Serge wrote that "Totalitarianism has no more dangerous enemy than the spirit of criticism, which it bends every effort to exterminate. Any reasonable objection is bundled away with shouts, and the objector himself, if he persists, is bundled off on a stretcher to the mortuary. I have met my assailants face to face in public meetings, offering to answer any question they raised. Instead they always strove to drown my voice in storms of insults, delivered at the tops of their voices."

This book is dense, but full of wisdom and pathos. If you are a student of the history of the Twentieth Century, I can recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review- The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor

 The Battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006                                 ISBN 0297848321

Those few of you who regularly read my reviews will know that I have a lot of good things to say about Antony Beevor's writing. Pithily concise, his narratives take the reader into the heart of the history he is portraying, condensing and analyzing some of the Twentieth Century's worst battles and conflicts. The Battle for Spain is a complete re-working of a book published by Beevor in 1982 entitled The Spanish Civil War, which I vaguely remember reading.

The Spanish Civil War can be a very confusing conflict and, in terms of its historical treatment, one in which much more has been written about the Republican side than the Nationalists. This no doubt has occurred because much more of interest happened on the Republican side than on the other side, which was pretty much a military junta (of one) from early on in the War.

Beevor is no different - much of the book is concerned with the political movements of the various factions that made up the Republican side: Anarchists, Communists, Socialists, and more moderate Republicans. He begins his narrative with a quick look at the rule of Primo de Rivera and the fall of the monarchy. He explains how the electoral system, favouring coalitions above individual parties, meant that the government could (and did) swing from one extreme to the other. When the Popular Front won in 1936, their rhetoric frightened many in conservative Spain - especially the Army - and this was the immediate cause of Franco's uprising.

As is well-known, both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany came to Franco's aid: what is perhaps less well-known, and which Beevor points out, is that many businessmen in England and the USA also supported Franco with money and materials, and the Catholic lobby in the US ensured that Roosevelt maintained the embargoes on the Republican government that meant they could not get the military equipment they so desperately needed.

The Soviet Union was really the only source of material that the Republic could rely on, and Beevor documents how Stalin extracted his "pound of flesh"; first by sequestering much of Spain's gold reserves, and then by infiltrating the Republican Army and Government with Communist functionaries. It got to the stage by the end of the war that only units commanded by and containing communists were getting ammunition and sometimes even food. Paranoia about "fifth-columnists" and the other political movements crippled any effective action that the Republic tried to take. Often there was fighting in the towns and cities of the Republic between anarchist and communist militias - even to the extent that units might leave the front lines to go and fight their political enemies. The military strategy of the Republic was corrupted by the communist influence as well, where the propaganda value of victory in large set-piece battles was more important than devising a strategy that would use the Republic's limited resources more wisely while keeping the Nationalists at bay until the wider European conflagration began, when the Republican leaders hoped that the democracies would finally support them against the proto-fascism of Franco.

The Nationalist side had far fewer open political sores - once Franco had deftly beheaded the Falange and the Carlists, he focussed on the complete annihilation of the Republic. He was not interested in a negotiated truce or cease-fire: only complete liquidation of anyone even remotely suspected of support for democracy was satisfactory. After failing to take Madrid in 1936, he used his army to reduce the Republic's hold on industrial and agricultural areas, and to destroy the military capacity of the Government forces. His allies were far less inclined to interfere in the politics of the Nationalist side, but Germany took her "payment" in natural resources from Spain's mines, and in using Spain as a test-bed for their new weaponry and tactics. Italy, under the erratic Mussolini, spent much blood and treasure for little return - in fact his excursion into Spain left him dangerously under-resourced to fight the war that was to come.

The Battle for Spain covers this ground well, and gives good descriptions of the main battles and campaigns of the war, which were mostly disasters for the Republic, and costly for both sides. The outrages of both sides are documented here as well, using material that has come to light since Beevor wrote his first book in the early 80s.

The confusion of the War, where the Republican side was simultaneously fighting a war and a communist/anarchist revolution for much of the time, makes any narrative history difficult to write. Beevor has done his usual good job in trying to untangle the horrible mess that befell Spain in the late 1930s, and The Battle for Spain is a recommended book if you want to know more about this conflict. 

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston

 The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain by Paul Preston

New York: W.W. Norton, 2012              ISBN: 9780393064766

Usually once I've finished a book I write a review shortly after, but I've been mulling over this one for a week or so and I'm still not sure what I think of it on many levels. It's certainly a tour-de-force of scholarship, and a harrowing catalogue of the atrocities committed by both sides of what was a terrible civil war.

Paul Preston is a long-standing Spanish Civil War historian, and in The Spanish Holocaust, he has collected together information about the many atrocities perpetrated by both the Nationalist and Republican sides. Most of the crimes Preston chronicles occurred during the war itself, with a short chapter on post-war retribution by Franco.

The revelations of what happened are truly shocking, and go to the hatred that was endemic within the Spanish polity by 1936, exacerbated by a history of repression that had existed in the country for decades before. The Spanish Holocaust assumes a knowledge not only of broader Spanish history, but also of the progress of the War itself, and the depth of Preston's research means that many of the incidents he describes can turn into a parade of names, times, and places that become confusing.

There is also a strange bias in Preston's book - for this reader anyway. While there is no doubt that the Nationalist side committed more barbarities than the Republican side, Preston continually excuses the Republican crimes, while excoriating the Nationalists every time. This obvious bias - which extends to Preston writing that anti-Republicans should have known that Largo Caballero's threat of revolution was an empty one, and therefore not have staged the coup (why they should have known that is never explained) - colours what is otherwise an excellent book.

From the detailed descriptions of the crimes of both sides, the reader can draw some conclusions about the wider war. The Nationalists, under Mola and Franco, were absolutely ruthless. They let nothing stand in the way of their conquest of Spain, gathering any forces that might be useful to them, which meant the landowners, the Church, business and of course the army. What did they want? They wanted to go back to a time before democracy and the republic, when their groups had total sway over society - so they effectively sold their souls to Franco, who not only destroyed any opposition, perceived or real, but double-crossed most of these allies by taking control himself.

The Church in particular played a murky role in the putsch and war that followed: while there were some religious who tried to minimize the violence and suffering, much of the Church hierarchy encouraged and enabled the Nationalists in their rampage across the country. Some priests even took part in the murders and fighting.

In contrast to the single-mindedness of the Nationalist forces, the Republican side was doomed from the start owing to the fractiousness of the varied groups that comprised the Popular Front. The main protagonists, the forces of the Anarchists and Communists, were at odds with each other, and often literally at each other's throats. The more moderate Republicans were squeezed in the middle. While the Nationalists had one aim - to crush the forces of the Republic, and the Republic itself, the Republican forces were not only resisting Franco, but trying to bring a social revolution to the country at the same time. This led to a dispersal of effort that was fatal to their cause. The only reason the war lasted as long as it did was that the Nationalist side not only wanted to win a military victory, but also crush the Republican spirit for generations to come.

This book is very hard to read, a grueling trawl through horrors that can be hard to credit, and that emphasize the hatred that existed between sections of Spanish society at that time. Preston has used much recent scholarship to show us in great detail the machinations of the terror that descended from 1936 up until the early 1950s. This book will be a resource for many years to come for those with an interest in the Spanish Civil War, despite the curious bias that comes no doubt from Preston's anguish at the horrors inflicted on all by the decision to overthrow a government.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

 Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966 (original publication date 1932)

Well there you go. I approached this book fully expecting not to finish it, and yet it has been one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year. Hemingway's first foray into non-fiction was an interesting choice: as a fan of Spanish bullfighting, he chose to write in English a description of not only how bullfights are run, but an explanation of what it was about bullfights that made them not merely a barbarous and cruel slaughter. Along the way he also writes about the history of the sport, of Spain itself, as well as indulging in some literary discussion.

This book is pure Hemingway, in that it is a book of strong and sure opinion, of deep explanation, and of arrogance. Arrogance is very much a trope of the young Hemingway, and the arrogance he showed in not only writing this book, but expecting it to sell, is breathtaking. His arrogance is not unjustified however, as he has through his writing ensured that what the reader sees is not the mere killing of a bull, but the tragedy that is human life, reflected through the lens of the corrida.

For Hemingway describes the bullfight as the course of a tragedy. In the first act, we see the heroism of the bull, as he attacks all around him, especially the horse and the picador. Against the horse, the bull shows us his power and strength. The second act, when the banderillas are inserted in the shoulders of the bull, is a fight between man and bull, while the third act, when the matador uses the muleta and the sword to kill the bull, shows man's dominance over the beast and exalts the inevitable death of the bull to something sacred.

Hemingway was always fascinated with death: in fact the reason he states for writing this book and attending bullfights in the first place was that he wanted to see the moment of death so that he could write truly about it, and the bullfight was the best place for him to find death. Hemingway was always concerned to get to the truth of something - he was obsessed with writing the true word, the true sentence, the true book. Personally, I'm not sure that he ever came to the realization that, for a writer, the truth is theirs, and theirs alone. The reader may get a truth out of the writer's work, but it is the reader's truth, which may not necessarily be the truth that the writer wished to impart. Hemingway was no doubt a brilliant writer, but perhaps not a perceptive judge of humankind.

A large portion of this book is about death - there is a whole chapter on the act of killing the bull, and how it should be done, with Hemingway's critiques of various matador's ability to do it "properly". Hemingway also spends a lot of time in the book discussing the motivations of the matadors, who face real danger in the ring. Why do they do it, how it affects them, and what happens to them after a near-death experience in the ring are all subjected to Hemingway's scrutiny. He shows us that the bullring is a place where true courage and valour will out, along with fear, cowardice and treachery.

He describes the breeding of the bulls, and how they are prepared for the ring, and their bravery and fear, which has a huge effect on the outcome of an individual fight. The chicanery of breeders, and of matadors, is much on Hemingway's mind. He describes the various tricks matadors perform to try to avoid danger while still seeming to fight the bull, and how life for a matador can be perilous, with only the best earning big money.

The detail in this book is absolute. There is nothing about the bullfight that is overlooked, Hemingway even including a glossary of all the terms used in the ring, which is a delight to read in itself.

If you have ever found yourself wondering about bullfighting, reading Death in the Afternoon will tell you all you need to know. After I finished it I hunted around on the internet to watch video of a bullfight and could not only thanks to Hemingway understand what was going on, but also understand the deeper truths held within the action. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Eagle and the Serpent by John Selby

The Eagle and the Serpent: The Spanish and American Invasions of Mexico: 1519 and 1846

by John Selby                         London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978      ISBN 0241897475


A short and interesting book, reminding us that Mexico in the time of the Aztecs and the Spanish covered much of the Southwest of what became the United States. Selby describes in the first half of this book how Spain took over not only Mexico's heartland, but expanded into what is now Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico, and, in the second half, how the United States took much of the aforementioned territory from them.

For this reader, the story of Cortes and his march on Tenochtitlan and subsequent overthrow of the Aztec Empire is a familiar one. It still boggles the mind that such a small group of Spaniards could overthrow such a civilization, albeit with help from local Indian allies. While the theory that personalities can shape history is these days seen as a dated way to look at the past, there seems little doubt that both Cortes' strength of will and Moctezuma's weakness of character bore strongly on the outcome of their clash.

Spanish reach soon covered most of today's Mexico, and expanded Northwards, driven by missionaries. While ostensibly part of Mexico, this Northern part was in many respects independent, being hard to reach overland owing to the desert country in between it and metropolitan Mexico, and through lack of population.

Mexico were keen to increase population in these areas, partly for development, but also to forestall the encroaching Americans from taking the land. Ironically, it was to the US that they looked for immigrants, and in the early 1800s quite a few people moved West to try their luck under the flag of Mexico.

It wasn't long before the "natives" got restless, and skirmishes developed between the new immigrants and those who had been there longer. The lack of effective governmental control did not help the situation, nor did the incursions of US "explorers", who were mostly military men with eventual conquest on their mind.

The banning of further US immigration into Texas began the break-up of this part of Mexico, with disaffected locals declaring the Republic of Texas, and,with US help, cementing their independence. Further unrest followed further West, with Americans in California working to undermine the sovereignty of Mexico and move to US control. The ascension of Polk as President, and his desire to acquire land, moved the conflict into open war.

Meanwhile, the Mexican government was very unstable, with Santa Anna the cause of much of that instability. His military efforts were mostly ineffective, and when the US Army invaded and took Mexico City, there was little the Mexican Government could do but accede to the US offer to purchase the land that became Arizona, New Mexico and California.

Selby's book is a clear, concise introduction to a period of history that non-Americans might be surprised to know occurred in the way it did. There is a useful (if now dated) bibliography as well.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Spain under Franco: a history by Max Gallo

Spain under Franco: a history by Max Gallo, translated by Jean Stewart

London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1973 (originally published in French in 1969)

ISBN 0049460099

This an interesting, if somewhat dense, book that focuses on the politics of Franco and the various branches of the opposition to his rule, between the Civil War and the end of the 60s. Starting with the end of the Civil War, Gallo describes how the defining characteristic of Franco was his caution - he never made a move unless he was certain of the outcome, or had another path to take if needed.

Thus although he relied on the Axis powers for his victory in the Civil War, he was able to obfuscate around joining the battle against the Allied Powers, and nimbly move to the "other" side when the outcome of hostilities became obvious.

Once the War was over, Franco kept control through a classic "divide and rule" strategy, periodically seeming to acquiesce to the claims of one or other of the Falange, Carlists or other monarchist factions, only to quash them if they got too far ahead of themselves. He also controlled the Royal Family in much the same way, pitting father against son, and both against the Bourbon pretender.

These machinations enable Franco to seem to rise above petty squabbling and portray himself as the only person who could hold Spain together, and avoid a further fratricidal struggle, and keep Spain a country that was Catholic and united.

What Gallo shows us is that one thing Spain wasn't was united. From the end of the war, opposition to Franco emerged in guerrilla activities, sabotage, strikes and pamphleteering. The regime cracked down hard on any dissent, and the opposition groups could not put up a united front, with constant bickering between the Republicans, Monarchists and Communists blighting any attempt at country-wide protest. This doomed any effort at rebellion to failure, but these failures did not dim the desire for many to rid themselves of the Franco Regime.

Gallo is certainly not on the side of Franco in this book, although he clearly shows what an effective leader and ringmaster he was. While - as a Socialist and ex-Communist himself - he clearly sides with the opposition forces, Gallo explains clearly how they failed to make much of an impression on a system that was only too happy to resort to censorship, imprisonment and state-sanctioned violence to stay in power.

Staying in power was what the regime was all about, and it did this by pandering to those large land-owners and capitalists that controlled the country. Francoism did very little over it's history to ensure working people were better off, and was more than happy to ship large numbers of them to Northern Europe as workers. The regime deliberately curtailed education and training, and periodically tried to crush regional separatism as well. While many Europeans enjoyed the sun and sand of Spanish holidays, they failed to see that Spain was, still, effectively a totalitarian dictatorship.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Francoism died with Franco, and Spain rapidly transitioned to democratic rule - this was far from clear at the time Gallo wrote this book, and his fears for the future of the country are mapped out in the final few pages.

One for the aficionado, Spain under Franco is an interesting slice of history.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The death of Lorca by Ian Gibson

The death of Lorca by Ian Gibson

London: W.H. Allen, 1973          ISBN: 0491010400

In days when even the spokesman for the US President forgets the history of World War II in claiming that Hitler didn't kill his own countrymen with chemical weapons, what chance that anyone walking the street will cast a thought back to the Spanish Civil War, that terrible precursor to the worldwide conflagration that began six months after the final Republican surrender?

And yet the history of that war keeps coming back to haunt us. Recently Spain has been grappling with the horrors that occurred during the war, and the cover-ups and mendacities that happened after it, under the long tight grip of the Franco regime.

This book, by English academic Ian Gibson, was written in the final years of Franco, and was the first disinterested attempt to find out what happened in the final days of Federico Garcia Lorca, certainly the most famous Spanish poet of the Twentieth Century. His murder was one of the early outrages to occur in the Civil War, and became a stain that the Nationalists were desperate to eradicate from their history for many years.

Gibson was in the fortunate position to be in Granada in the late 1960s, and could speak to people who were in the town at the time when the initial uprising occurred, and who were eye-witnesses to many of the horrible events of that time. He begins the book with some short chapters on Lorca, and his relationship with the Republic, and on the twists and turns of Spanish electoral history in the 20s and 30s that led up to the attempted coup.

He describes in some detail the fall of Granada, and the brutal repression that followed, in which thousands of people were summarily executed (Gibson puts the figure somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 people). Many old enmities were expunged in the name of the country, and countless innocents were caught in the horrible terror that ran from July 1936 well into the next year.

Lorca's heart was with the Republic and the peasants, and he was widely seen as left-wing, but was hardly a great presence on the political stage. At the outbreak of the rebellion he felt he had to leave Madrid for his hometown of Granada, not from a feeling that he would necessarily be safer there, but because he wanted to be near his family.

It was not long after the Nationalists took Granada that Lorca realised that he was going to become a target for the new regime, and so he turned to one of his good friends, Luis Rosales, who was in fact a member of the Nationalist hierarchy in Granada - a member of the Falange. Rosales sheltered him in his house for several days.

However, as Gibson's detective work shows, there were other forces at work. One of those forces took shape in the figure of Ramon Ruiz Alonso, a failed right-wing politico with a grudge against Rosales. He organised a raid on the house while Rosales was at the front, and took Lorca to the Civil Government Building and handed the poet over to Valdes, the governor. It seems clear that Lorca was kept in this building for several days: Valdes was unsure what to do with his famous "prisoner", until his superior, the infamous Quiepo de Llano, instructed that Lorca was to be shot. Gibson was probably the first to find out the exact chronology and location surrounding his murder - he was taken a short distance out of Granada, shot in the back of the neck and buried.

The Nationalist forces soon realised that the murder was a great mistake, and if the truth got out it would be a propaganda coup for the Republicans. And so a campaign of obscufation began, which surrounded the facts with a farrago of half-truths, outright lies and conspiracy theories. Gibson devotes some time to each of theses, shooting them down when he can, and pointing out holes in others. It doesn't help when people with an intimate role in Lorca's final days swear to conflicting stories about what happened.

As can be the case, this book about a single life throws the appalling massacre that occurred in Spain in sharp relief - as Gibson writes in the final paragraph of this book "Had Federico not died that morning in Viznar, the thousands of other innocent, but less well known, granadinos liquidated by the rebels might have been forgotten. As it is they will be remembered long after those responsible for the repression have passed into oblivion."

An interesting and educative read.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Carlist Wars in Spain by Edgar Holt

The Carlist Wars in Spain by Edgar Holt

London: Putnam, 1967


The tangle of 20th and 21st century Spanish politics is confusing to the outsider. The tragedy of the Civil War, the systemic decline and brutality meted out by Franco, and the continuing ructions over secession by various areas of the country make it politically a very foreign place to one living in a stable Westminster democracy. As always though, delving a little into history can help clarify why situations are as they are, and this book by Edgar Holt does that within the limits he has set himself.

Ostensibly a series of wars over succession to the Spanish throne, the Carlist Wars had more to do with the clash of liberalism with tradition, country with city, and industrialization with agrarianism than specific loyalty to a particular royal personage. The initial trigger for the conflict was a dispute over whether a daughter could inherit the throne from her father. Ferdinand's brother, Don Carlos, who had been heir to the Spanish throne, thought that Ferdinand's daughter Isabella was not the legitimate heir, and that he was the rightful king.

Don Carlos had the support of the Church and the countryside, especially in Northern Spain, where Isabella's connection to more liberal elements in Spain were met with deep suspicion. Isabella became queen as a young child, and initially her mother Cristina, as regent, kept the Carlist forces at bay, but eventually her immaturity and lack of diplomatic skill allowed Don Carlos to start the first Carlist War.

While there were some set-piece battles, much of the war became a series of guerrilla raids through North and Central Spain. A particular feature of the war was the brutality meted out to those unfortunate enough to be made prisoner, with no quarter shown much of the time. Holt spends much time on the English Legion sent to Spain to help Isabella and Cristina. A semi-official force (the English government supported the Liberal Isabella, even though King William was sympathetic to the Carlist cause), the Legion did perform some good things on the battlefield, but failed to deliver any decisive blow.

Eventually Don Carlos' generals all came to see that there would be no decisive battle, and with the major cities all staying firmly in Isabella's camp, eventually the Carlist cause faded away, and Don Carlos himself went into exile, but never renounced his right to rule.

Isabella eventually left Spain in disgrace, leading to a revival of Carlism, with Don Carlos' grandson, who styled himself Carlos VII, trying once again to wrest the throne from the Italian-born Amadeo, who was imposed on the Spanish people and rapidly became unpopular. When Amadeo abdicated, and Spain became a republic, Carlos saw his chance to gain further support from disaffected monarchists who had initially supported Amadeo. Unfortunately for Carlos Isabella's son, Alfonso came to claim the throne after a coup dislodged the republic. Alfonso, with his ties to the Church and the traditions of Spain, took the ground from under Carlos' feet, and led to him losing support and leaving Spain.

The Carlist cause continued on however, bubbling away under the surface, supporting the traditions of Spanish Roman Catholicism, and traditional rights of local areas (especially in the Basque country), and generally being a thorn in the side of the more progressive forces in Spanish political life. Holt's book discusses Franco's use (and abuse) of Carlist forces in the Spanish Civil War, noting that they (in 1967) were still upholding the rights of the Carlist claimants against the eventual succesor to Franco, Juan Carlos.

Holt's book is easy to read, and for those interested in 20th century Spanish history, is a good introduction to the sources of much of the trouble.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell