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The civil war that tore Spain apart between 1936 and 1939 and attracted liberals and socialists from across the world to support the cause against Franco was one of the most hard-fought and bitterest conflicts of the 20th century: a war of atrocities and political genocide and a military testing ground before WWII for the Russians, Italians and Germans, whose Condor Legion so notoriously destroyed Guernica.
This was Antony Beevor's first work of non-fiction, pre-dating his international bestselling STALINGRAD and BERLIN: THE DOWNFALL 1945. Now, more than 20 years later, he has substantially rewritten it drawing on masses of newly-discovered material from the Spanish, Russian and German archives. His account narrates the origins of the Civil War and its violent and dramatic course from the coup d'etat in July 1936 through the savage fighting of the next three years which ended in catastrophic defeat for the Republicans in 1939. And he succeeds especially well in unravelling the complex political and regional forces that played such an important part in the origins and history of the war.
About the author
Antony Beevor, Jahrgang 1946, ist ehemaliger britischer Berufsoffizier. Außer mit Romanen hat er sich mit mehrfach ausgezeichneten geschichtlichen Sachbüchern (u.a. über die Resistance und den Spanischen Bürgerkrieg) einen Namen gemacht. Ausgezeichnet u. a. mit dem Samuel Johnson Award für Sachbücher, dem Hawthornden Award sowie dem Wolfson Award für historische Werke. Antony Beevor ist Fellow der Royal Society of Literature und Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres sowie Gastprofessor an der University of London, School of History, Classics and Archaeology. Er lebt mit seiner Familie in London.
Report
he has produced a moving masterpiece of the indictment of war. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto THE TLS
