There have been well over 15,000 books written in English about the Spanish Civil War – twice that many in Spanish, and more are published every month in Spain.
Here I’ve listed some of the books that influenced me most when I was writing A World Between Us, as well as a few more recent publications, many of which I wish I’d been able to read earlier. I’ve divided the books and articles into categories, but of course there’s a certain amount of overlap: classics, new works, general histories, memoirs, journalism, medicine, women, poetry, 1930s Britain and so on.
These are some of the books that first got me interested in the Spanish Civil War, from teenage years onwards, in order of when I first read them (as far as I can remember!):
Nancy Mitford The Pursuit of Love (1945)
Jessica Mitford Hons and Rebels (1960)
George Orwell Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Gerald Brennan South from Granada (1957) & The Spanish Labyrinth (1943)
Gamel Woolsey Death’s Other Kingdom (1939)
Laurie Lee A Moment of War (1991)
Giles Tremlett Ghosts of Spain: Travels through a Country’s Hidden Past (2006)
I found these memoirs by International Brigade Volunteers and others particularly useful:
Walter Gregory The Shallow Grave
Tom Wintringham English Captain
James Neugass War is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War (ed. Peter N. Carroll & Peter Glazer) (Read reviews in The Nation and the LRB. Use this website if you’re going to Spain and want to see where Neugass wrote about.)
Jason Gurney Crusade in Spain
David Crook Hampstead Heath to Tian An Men
Hank Rubin Spain’s Cause Was Mine (1997)
Penny Fyvel English Penny (1992)
George Wheeler To Make the People Smile Again (2003)
Bernard Knox Premature Anti-Fascist
Charlotte Haldane Truth Will Out (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1949)
Alvah Bessie’s Spanish Civil War Notebooks (University Press of Kentucky, 2001)
Marcel Acier, ed. From Spanish Trenches: recent letters from Spain (1937)
John Langdon-Davies Behind the Spanish Barricades (1936)
Ed. Cary Nelson & Jefferson Hendricks Madrid 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade From the Spanish Civil War
Francesca Wilson In the Margins of Chaos (1944)
Women’s perspectives:
Jim Fyrth and Sally Alexander, eds. Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (1991)
Angela Jackson British Women and the Spanish Civil War (2002)
Paul Preston Doves of War: Four Women of the Spanish Civil War (2004)
General histories:
Anthony Beevor The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
Helen Graham The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005)
Gerald Howson Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (1998)
Jim Jump, ed. Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010)
Paul Preston The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge (Harper Perennial, 2006)
Richard Baxell British Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War: The British Battalion in the International Brigades, 1936-1939 (Warren & Pell, 2007)
Judith Keene Fighting For Franco: International Volunteers in Nationalist Spain During the Spanish Civil War (Continuum, 2007)
Bill Alexander British volunteers for liberty (1982)
James Hopkins Into the heart of fire (1982)
Poetry
Jim Jump, ed. Poems from Spain: British and Irish International Brigaders on the Spanish Civil War (Lawrence & Wishart, 2006)
Valentine Cunningham The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse (2008)
Langston Hughes Spanish Civil War Broadside
(Read more about Hughes here and here.)
W.H.Auden Spain, (Faber & Faber, 1937)
Ed. Pat Sloan John Cornford: a memoir (1938)
Jane Dowson, ed. Women’s Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology (Routledge, 1995)
Jane Duran Silences from the Spanish Civil War (Enitharmon Press, 2002)
Medical History:
Nicholas Coni Medicine and Warfare: Spain, 1936-1939 (Routledge, 2008)
Angela Jackson Beyond the Battlefield: Testimony, Memory and Remembrance of a Cave Hospital in the Spanish Civil War (Warren & Pell, 2005)
Robert A Kilduffe and Michael DeBakey The Blood Bank and the Technique and Therapeutics of Transfusions (1942)
Reginald Saxton ‘The Madrid Blood Transfusion Institute’, The Lancet 1937 pp606-7
Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon, The Scalpel, the Sword (1952)
Sinclair-Loutit K, ‘An ambulance in Spain’, The Lancet 1936, pp1295-6.
Alex Tudor Hart, ‘War Surgery in Spain’, The British Medical Journal , May 27 1939, p1099
Journalism
Paul Preston We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War (Constable, 2009)
Herbert Southworth Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Propaganda and History
Arturo Barea The Forging of a Rebel: the Clash (Granta, 2001)
Ian Patterson Guernica and Total War (Profile, 2007)
Virginia Cowles Looking for Trouble (1941)
Edward Knoblaugh Correspondent in Spain (2004)
Martha Gellhorn The Face of War (1959)
Britain in the 1930s & East End
Jim Fyrth The Signal was Spain (Lawrence & Wishart, 1986)
Emanuel Litvinoff Journey Through a Small Planet (1972)
Simon Blumenfeld, Jew Boy (1935) (Look at the original cover.)
Arnold Wesker Chicken Soup with Barley (1958)
Leila Berg Flickerbook: An Autobiography (1998)
Tom Buchanan The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain (Sussex Academic Press, 2006)
Paul Laity, ed. Left Book Club Anthology (Victor Gollancz, London, 2001)
Juliet Gardiner The Thirties: an intimate history (HarperPress, 2010)
Tony Kushner & Nadia Valman, Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Society (Valentine Mitchell, 1999)
Joe Jacobs Out of the Ghetto (1991)
Other fiction
Javier Cercas Soldiers of Salamis (2004) (You can hear a fascinating Q & A on the book with Cercas himself, including readings, chaired by Harriett Gilbert on the BBC’s World Book Club. Highly recommended.)
Alberto Méndez Blind Sunflowers (2008) (Hear the book discussed on Radio 4′s A Good Read)
Almundena Grandes The Frozen Heart (2011)
Andre Malraux Days of Hope (Penguin, 1989)
Ernest Hemingway The Fifth Column (1939)
Books for children and YA
Joan Lingard Tell the Moon to Come Out (Puffin, 2003)
Michael Morpurgo Toro! Toro! (HarperCollins, 2007)
James Watson The Freedom Tree (first published in 1986, this is now available again as an ebook)
Alan Gibbons Street of Tall People (Five Leaves, 2011)
Newly available:
The Guardian Book: selected Guardian reports of the SCW, 1936-39 (available online as a pdf)
Some documentaries available online:
Voices from a Mountain (David Leach, 2001): ‘A documentary film about British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, focusing on the re-discovery in the Pandols mountains near Gandesa, Catalonia, of a memorial to English-speaking soldiers killed at the Battle of the Ebro in the summer of 1938.’
part one, part two, part three, part four
*NEW* This original film shows the return of the British volunteers in December 1938, and was screened at the Philosophy Football commemorative event in December 2013:
These were published after I’d written A World Between Us and represent the very latest research:
Richard Baxell Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism (Aurum, 2012)
Paul Preston The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (HarperPress, 2012)
Helen Graham The War and its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century (Sussex Academic Press, 2012)
Linda Palfreeman Salud!: British Volunteers in the Republican Medical Service during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Sussex Academic Press, 2012)
Angela Jackson For Us It Was Heaven: The Passion, Grief and Fortitude of Patience Darton – from the Spanish Civil War to Mao’s China (Sussex Academic Press, 2012)
David Lethbridge ‘“The Blood Fights on in Other Veins”: Norman Bethune and the Transfusion of Cadaver Blood in the Spanish Civil War’, CBMH/BCHM, Vol 29:1 2012 p. 69-81.
David Rosenberg Battle for the East End: Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s (Five Leaves publications, 2011)
The Cable Street Group, The Battle of Cable Street (2011)
Richard Rhodes, Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made(Simon and Schuster, 2015) Watch his excellent introduction to the SCW here.
Peter N Carroll, From Guernica to Human Rights: Essays on the Spanish Civil War, (Kent State University Press, 2015)
Films worth watching (for all sorts of reasons…)
Pan’s Labyrinth
The Butterfly’s Tongue
Land and Freedom
Mourir á Madrid
The Spirit of the Beehive
(Find out more about the Spanish Civil War on screen here and here.)
Radio programmes online:
BBC Radio 3 Night Waves discussion with Paul Preston and Maria Dalgado
Radio New Zealand: ’I Remember Jarama’ & ‘A Nurse’s Story’
CBC Radio‘s The Spanish Crucible offers a chance to hear rare recordings of Canadian volunteers
Full English text of Dolores Ibárruri’s farewell address to the International Brigades
Interview in Camden New Journal
The International Brigade Memorial Trust was formed in 2002 to educate the public in the history of the men and women who fought in the International Brigades and worked in medical and other support services in the Spanish Civil War. The IBMT website is extremely comprehensive, and includes a ‘roll of honour‘ listing volunteers from the British Isles known to have died in Spain. This is regularly updated as new information becomes available.
The British Battalion’s archives are housed at the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell.
Trabajadores: The Spanish Civil War through the eyes of organised labour: over 13,000 pages of SCW archives, with useful background information about the conflict.
London’s Imperial War Museum offers a particularly wide range of resources on the Spanish Civil War, from posters to interviews, many accessible online.
The Working Class Movement Library in Salford is rich in SCW material, including archival material from a number of organisations established in Britain to help the Spanish Republic (British Youth Peace Assembly/Spanish Youth Foodship Committee, Friends Of Spain, Manchester and Salford Foodships For Spain, National Joint Committee For Spanish Relief, Spanish Medical Aid Committee, Wounded and Dependents’ Aid Committee)
If you are going to Madrid, you won’t find a better guide than Almudena Cros of Across Madrid Tours. Highly recommended, whether you want a general introduction for children or have specific research questions. Almudena offers unique insights into Spanish Civil War history, politics and art.
Spartacus Educational includes a comprehensive and accessible SCW online ‘encyclopaedia’.
Richard Baxell, author of Unlikely Warriors, is the leading historian of the British volunteers in Spain.
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives is an invaluable resource: a non-profit educational organisation dedicated to promoting public awareness, research, and discussion about the Spanish Civil War, with an emphasis on American volunteers.
Americans in the Spanish Civil War is a fascinating ongoing project to build a comprehensive biographical dictionary of American individuals involved in the war.
In Spain there is a now a campaign for a Truth Commission on the Crimes of Francoism (Plataforma por las Comisión de la Verdad sobre los crímines del franquismo), a coalition of over 100 agencies and organisations around the world trying to create a UN Truth Commission in pursuit of justice for the families of the victims of the enforced disappearances that took place during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship that followed. Read more about the initiative here (on the ALBA site).
The AABI – Associacion de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales – is a voluntary organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of the International Brigades in Spain, and celebrating their spirit. You can read the AABI’s wonderful website in many languages and also buy their guide to places/routes in Madrid connected with the International Brigades in both English and Spanish.
International Brigader Bosco Jones talks about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.
Philosophy Football is the place to go for Spanish Civil War T-shirts, books, events, etc.
Porta de la Historia offers SCW related tours in Catalonia and beyond, and lots of information on their website too.
The Spanish Civil war at Archives Hub: here you can search across archives held at 220 institutions across the UK.
Watch Pathé newsreels of the Spanish Civil War, such as this 1937 report on the bombing of Madrid.
HOPE– Heritage of People’s Europe – networks the digital collections of European institutions in social history and the history of the labour movement & unites more than 880,000 digitised objects from the end of the 18th century down to the present, making them available through web based platforms like Europeana and the Labour History portal.
Finding John Cornford is a new project devoted to raising the profile of one of the first British volunteers to fight and die in Spain in order to increase awareness of the war and its wider consequences.
The East End, London & Britain in the 1930s
Historian David Rosenberg offers guided walks of the East End and further afield – the perfect introduction to London’s radical past. Anti-Fascist Footprints is a two-hour tour from Gardiners Corner to Cable Street, telling the stirring tale of the East End’s resistance to Mosley’s Fascists. Or contact David for details of a specially devised A World Between Us walk, ideal for book groups: visit the main East End locations in the novel and find out more about the fascinating historical background to the story. A World Between Us walks last 90 minutes and cost just £6/£4, with a minimum group size of 8.
Webhome of the Cable Street Group
The Bishopsgate Institute is the home of world-renowned collections on London history, labour and socialist hoister, free thought and humanism, co-operation, and protest and campaigning (including the archive of my grandfather, Jack Gaster)
The Jewish Museum in London has a strong social history collection, including material on the SCW.
Inspired by activists: Freddy Shaw writes about his IB father, Jack Shaw
London Books are ‘flying the flag for free-thinking literature’
London Fictions is a site celebrating the novels which capture the essence of an intriguing city
The Archive of the Communist Party of Great Britain is an immensely rich online resource, which makes available material housed at the Labour History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC), Manchester.
For younger children, Becky Jones & Clare Lewis’ London Adventure Walks for Families offers a great choice of self-guided explorations of the city, including a Spitalfields walk (pp106-112)
Music, art & photography
Find out lots more about the songs in A World Between Us here and listen to a radio documentary about the Republican music of the Spanish Civil War made for the 75th anniversary of its outbreak.
The Visual Front is an exceptionally well-documented online gallery of Spanish Civil War posters from the Herbert R. Southworth Collection
The BNE (Biblioteca Nacional de España) also has a huge number of posters.
You can see photographs from the PCE Archive (mostly of Madrid 1936/37 – some are very distressing) on the SBHAC website (Sociedad Benéfica de Historiadores Aficionados y Creadores) which is dedicated to preserving Republican memory. (PCE: Spanish Communist Party)
The story of The Mexican Suitcase, the discovery of missing negatives of photographs taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and ‘Chim’, is told at the International Centre of Photography website, where you can see extraordinary galleries of SCW images by all three photographers.
David Hoffman has specialised in social issues photography for over 30 years, and I’m very grateful to him for permission to use an image of the annual International Brigade commemoration in London on this site.