Paralysed by the Absence of Danger

Jeremy Harding

  • BuyLetters from Barcelona: An American Woman in Revolution and Civil War edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn
    Palgrave, 209 pp, £50.00, February 2009, ISBN 978 0 230 52739 3
  • BuyWar Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War by James Neugass
    New Press, 314 pp, £16.99, November 2008, ISBN 978 1 59558 427 4
  • BuyWe Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War by Paul Preston
    Constable, 525 pp, £9.99, June 2009, ISBN 978 1 84529 946 0

Lois and Charles Orr, an inquisitive, left-of-left couple, arrived in Barcelona in the autumn of 1936. Charles was 30, a serious fellow from Michigan; Lois was 19, more or less fresh from Kentucky. They had married earlier in the year and decided on a honeymoon in Europe. In Catalonia, a matter of weeks after Franco’s military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic, they settled happily into a political climate of intrigue and rivalry among the variegated species of anti-Fascists who failed, in the end, to hold the pass: bourgeois democrats and left republicans, socialists, anarchists and Marxists, as well as a host of foreigners, many in tune with the doctrines of the Communist International.

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