In his 1943 essay 'Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War', George Orwell wrote: 'I think we will come to see that Stalin's policy in Spain, which we now regard as so devilishly clever, was merely stupid and opportunistic.’ Orwell's interest in Stalin and Spain, of course, was more than merely academic: crossing the Soviet dictator's Spanish stooges had almost cost Orwell his life, and decisively altered his politics. Animal Farm and 1984 were the bitter fruits of Orwell's Spanish sojourn. When he wrote in the latter novel, 'If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever', it was probably the face of one of his comrades in Spain, Bob Smillie, of which he was thinking. (Smillie was kicked to death in a Stalinist secret prison.)

Both these searing books are concerned with the long shadows thrown by the Civil War. The Breaking Point explores the fate of another victim of Stalin, and the Spanish experiences of another great literary name: Ernest Hemingway. It is one of those rare books