The Spanish Civil War

"I think Helen Graham is probably the most profound historian writing about the Spanish Civil War in the English language. This little book, an Oxford University Press paperback, which is a short introduction, is a remarkable work in that in a very short space she manages to deal with everything. Despite spending 40 years researching this subject myself, I found that it just glitters with insights. It gave me angles on things that I hadn’t necessarily thought about before and yet is still a very good book to read if you are an absolute beginner on the subject. She is very good on the ramifications of how particular politicians dealt with particular issues. She’s very perceptive, especially on the whole issue of what was going on in Spain in relation to a much wider European experience – the dark continent where dreadful things were happening everywhere. She links them up in an extremely perceptive way. She is very keen on photography and the way visual elements can be symbolic or emblematic of what is going on in politics, and that is something that also filters through in the book. This is more apparent in her next book The War and its Shadow , which I have also read. Both books show how good she is at examining the meaning of certain images."