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“... From a distance, the image of a pistol-toting Civil Guard colonel holding prisoner Spain’s cabinet and members of parliament recalled Marx’s phrase that history, tragic in its first occurrence, repeats itself as farce. From a lesser distance, the long night of 23-24 February, with tanks in the streets of Valencia, national television taken over, ministers and deputies incarcerated under armed guard in the Cortes, sometimes seemed like history setting out to repeat itself as tragedy ...”

“... Having described a significant segment of his past in South from Granada, published in 1957, Gerald Brenan went on to write two volumes of autobiography, A Life of One’s Own (1902) and Personal Record (1974). These covered his life from early childhood to his return to southern Spain in 1953 when he was nearly sixty, with a few final pages devoted to the following twenty years ...”

“... In 1973 Ian Gibson published The Death of Lorca, his outstanding investigation into the circumstances, silenced for forty years by the Franco regime, of the poet’s assassination at the insurgent military’s hands in the first month of the Civil War. It is highly fitting, therefore, that Gibson should have now written the life of Lorca, as close to a definitive biography as we are likely to get ...”

“... Ralph Glasser’s and Nicholas Gage’s latest autobiographical instalments find their authors making good in their countries of adoption, England and the US respectively. The cost to each of their ascent from exceedingly harsh social beginnings has been different, but in ways that are not surprising: in England the struggle centred on class, in the US on money ...”

“... arranged to dramatic effect in interesting ways. Ralph Glasser’s is fresh from the oven, while Ronald Fraser’s appeared in 1984, gained a second impression last year, and is still being discussed. Juliet Mitchell has called it ‘a miniature masterpiece’, and it is a work which should have been discussed in this journal long before now, and would ...”

“... welcomed, however, by a quite different readership – the ‘student generation in revolt’ of Ronald Fraser’s title – and I was made to surrender my editorship to Tariq Ali. Before my dismissal, I appeared on television to defend the paper against A.J. Ayer, John Gross and Colin Welch – with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of ...”

“... at Paracuellos – probably the biggest single atrocity of the Spanish war. In Blood of Spain Ronald Fraser made a splendid case for oral history by recording the views and recollections of a great many witnesses – modest, and no doubt the more trustworthy for that – to all these events. The books in question go further than ever in reminding us ...”

“... means that some historians of the period now ignore the Spanish War of Independence altogether. Ronald Fraser’s Napoleon’s Cursed War will not do much to help resolve the debate over the conflict’s significance. The author, best known for an acclaimed oral history of the Spanish Civil War, has done extensive research, and written a fluid and ...”

“... of course, add up to the total collective experience: this is the conclusion which, in 1979, Ronald Fraser drew in his remarkable oral history of the Spanish Civil War, Blood of Spain. If there was enthusiasm, there was enthusiasm on both sides. Incompetence, treachery, disagreement, heroism, cowardice, bewilderment are scattered through the many ...”

“... the gratitude and affection of a host of authors as different as Edna O’Brien and Eric Ambler, Ronald Blythe and Antonia Fraser. That, perhaps, is the crucial difference between the two men. Lane was a publisher’s publisher, a man with immense commercial flair who opened up markets no one had ever dreamed existed but ...”

“... of material desire, of consumption, of get rich now. You might call it an empire of greed. Steve Fraser is a fine New Deal historian whose biography of the union leader Sidney Hillman, wistfully entitled Labour Will Rule, chronicled labour’s ascent into the top ranks of the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s. He flatly admires the egalitarian ...”

“... and the commissars had prevailed. It was nonetheless a compromise – the story is recorded by Ronald Fraser in Blood of Spain (1979) – and both sides had kept their heads during a series of knife-edge confrontations. Had it turned out differently, Neugass might not have got pork for supper. ‘Most of the anarchists,’ he tells his diary, like one ...”

“... Now more than 250 Hmong live there, and run two grocery stores. Little House on the Prairie was Ronald Reagan’s favourite television programme and also, by some accounts, Saddam Hussein’s. It was based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s eight novels, which have now entered the Library of America as The Little House Books: the first Tea Party favourites to join ...”

“... of The Tea-Shop, 1929, one of Burra’s Naughtee Paree numbers, perfect for a Folio Society Ronald Firbank reprint, makes it to the dust jacket.) Pictures, it’s true, might distract from the commissioned narrative and, anyway, biographers of painters should avoid frisking pictures for personal disclosures. Yet of all 20th-century British ...”

“... fashionable, don’t come up routinely in cuttings. It is good to see the Observer theatre critic Ronald Bryden being given his due for supporting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival: the play had been rejected by the BBC as ‘long, wordy and rambling’; Bryden has had a hundredth of the coverage that Kenneth Tynan got for ...”