Nicholas Rankin
Murky Waters
Papa Spy: Love, Faith and Betrayal in Wartime Spain
By Jimmy Burns
Bloomsbury 416pp £20 order from our bookshop
It is debatable whether the Catholics or the communists in 1930s Britain were quicker to ignore wrongdoing – one lot through religious faith and the other through political ideology. Just as Stalin’s crimes were excused by the Communist Party of Great Britain and their fellow-travellers as mere egg-breaking for the great socialist omelette, so many Roman Catholics in Britain applauded Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and Franco’s ‘crusade’ in Spain as blessed extensions of Christian civilisation.
Take Tom Burns, for example, the subject of his son Jimmy’s pietistic biography. Burns was the cradle Catholic publisher (and later editor of the Catholic weekly, The Tablet) who commissioned the 1930s travel books that took Evelyn Waugh to Abyssinia and Graham Greene to Mexico. Born in Chile
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers