Category: Background
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Liberty’s Fire: sources and background reading
“What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind?” Simply put, the Paris Commune was the radical municipal government elected to run the French capital in March 1871 immediately after the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris. This revolution shouldn’t be confused with the first French Revolution in 1789, or the…
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That Burning Summer: sources & background reading
Interested in exploring any of the history, ideas or places in That Burning Summer? Here are some good starting points – books, short stories, websites, online articles, films, museums etc, all loosely grouped by theme, many of which obviously overlap. Clearly, this is far from definitive. Most of this I used while I was writing the novel, but I…
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A World Between Us: sources & background reading
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…