Popular interest in the Spanish Civil War remains as strong as ever, and has been given a recent boost in Britain by such works of mass-market fiction as C J Sansom’s Winter in Madrid and Victoria Hislop’s The Return. In Spain the subject has acquired a new relevance and urgency through the introduction of the Law of Historical Memory, which has led to the continuing exhumation of mass graves, and the enforced exposure of hidden scandals and atrocities.

Personal testimonies of the war continue to provide the historian with endless material; and Paul Preston has now drawn upon these to produce a pioneering investigation of those foreign correspondents who did so much to influence world opinion at the time. The wealth of detail supplied is overwhelming. But Preston