Regular readers (hi, Mom!) may recall my post late last year about my overambitious plans for reading during my winter holidays, which amounted to me taking a pile of books about the Spanish Civil War out of the university library and foolishly assuming I would actually make a dent in them. I didn’t do that well, but I have managed to nearly finish one book, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War by Ronald Fraser. I thought I would write about my thoughts so far.
This book, really, is just fantastic. It’s stuff like this that makes me want to do a Masters degree in History. Fraser has managed to speak to a ridiculously-broad sample of Spaniards active in the Civil War, be they anarchists, communists, socialists, left republicans, monarchists, Basque nationalists or falangists – this achievement is doubly impressive considering that while the book was published in 1979, the vast majority of the interviews were conducted between 1973 and 1975, during the twilight years of Franco’s Spain; Franco actually died six months after the last interview was conducted. (more…)
