On 31 May 2018 I joined the biographer and filmmaker, Jane Rogoyska, for a presentation at L.S.E.'s Cañada Blanch Centre, chaired by Professor Paul Preston. We were outlining our thoughts on the image that had recently appeared on social media: did it really show the celebrated photojournalist, Gerda Taro, on her death bed?
In the Sky News studio talking about the former International Brigader, Geoffrey Servante, who died on 22 April 2019, aged 99. He was almost certainly the last surviving British veteran of the Spanish Civil War.
Pictured here with the two speakers at the IBMT's 2019 Len Crome conference in Oxford: to my right, the researcher and author Daniel Gray, to my left historian and The Guardian's football correspondent, Sid Lowe. There are more images on the IBMT's Flickr account.
Full report in the May 2019 issue of ¡No Pasarán!
I was very happy to take part in a short six minute film produced by the Gill Parker Consultancy. The film was commissioned by the LSE to showcase the expertise of the university's academics; in this instance Professor of Contemporary Spanish History, Paul Preston. In addition to myself, the film included interviews with former Basque child, Herminio Martínez; Professor of Spanish History, Helen Graham; and Spanish writer and journalist, Lala Isla.
On 9 August 2017, I introduced a number of readings relating to the International Brigades, movingly delivered by actors Christopher Ecclestone and Yolanda Vazquez and by Margot Heinemann’s daughter, Jane Bernal.
In July 2014 I joined presenter Jonathan Freedland, Shiraz Maher and Usama Hasan for Radio Four's 'The Long View', which discussed attitudes towards British people volunteering to fight in foreign wars.
2026
28 November 2026, Marx House, London. Len Crome annual event, with Profs Helen Graham and Paul Preston.
History, as the aphorism frequently attributed to Churchill would have it, is written by the victors. This certainly holds true for the Bayeux Tapestry, as anyone fortunate enough to have seen it recently in London will have seen. However, there are of course exceptions, one of the most glaring examples being the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. If British audiences know anything about the conflict at all, they will have likely come to it via supporters of the defeated Republicans such as George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway or having seen Ken Loach’s ‘story from the Spanish revolution’, Land and Freedom. As the German historian Reinhart Koelleck points out: ‘while the victors impose their view of the past in the short term, it is the defeated who advance historical knowledge because they are forced to ask why they lost.’ Or, as the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno dismissively informed General Millán-Astray, the brutal commander of the Spanish Legion during the civil war, ‘venceréis, pero no convenceréis’ (you will win, but you won’t convince) …
My review of Jo Labanyi’s cultural history of the Spanish Civil War appears in The Spectator.
On 12 November, 2020 I joined Giles for an online discussion and virtual launch of Giles Tremlett‘s new study of the International Brigades, hosted by the IBMT and Marx Memorial Library. You can listen to the discussion here.
My review of the book appears in the latest edition of The Spectator. I thought it an engaging read and a well-researched, comprehensive work of scholarship. Based on a mass of primary research, especially the RGASPI material in Moscow, he’s written a very even-handed, ‘warts and all’ account. And his conclusion is, I think a fair one:
‘There was nothing perfect about the brigaders and attempts to paint them as 20th century saints only serve to highlight their failings. These were (mostly) men at war. They killed and were killed. Some fought bravely, others did not. Some were noble and brave in their actions, others were cruel, cowardly or callous. Some fought for an ideal, others for adventure. And, for some, those ideals would take them on a journey of oppression that placed them closer, in their behaviour and blind defence of Stalinist communism, to the fascists whom they declared as their enemies than to the democratic Republic that they defended. All fought, however, against the most destructive and evil force unleashed by 20th century Europe’s violent politics and history. As Bernard Knox – by then a distinguished Classics professor at Yale – pointed out, there could be nothing ‘premature’ about anti-fascism.’
Giles Tremlett, The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, p. 528.
