Talk Radio's Home Schooling
On 12 June 2020 during Britain's Coronavirus lockdown, I was asked to contribute to Talk Radio's 'Home-Schooling' segment.
Who do you think you are?
Contributor on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ documentary on family history of Hollywood actress (Lost, Waking Ned, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, The Others) Fionnuala Flanagan, produced by Mint/RTE and broadcast in 2009.
The sections on Fionnuala’s International Brigader father, Terry Flanagan, were filmed on location in Madrid, Albacete and Madrigueras.
Fionnula Flanagan
‘Actress Fionnula Flanagan may live in Hollywood, but her heart is at home in Ireland. Her mother was born in a workhouse… but not for obvious reasons. Her father, from a large inner city family, grew up in a turbulent era, and eventually took his Republican & socialist principles across Europe to the Spanish Civil War. For the first time, Fionnula has a chance to understand her dad’s many battles, wounds and victories. But it’s back home in Dublin, while trying to grapple with the family circumstances that inspired her father, that Fionnula discovers a harsh truth about her grandmother: a woman who was the rock of the family.’
Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War
This book brings together leading British and Spanish historians in an examination of key aspects and themes of the Spanish Civil War. Contributors discuss the politics of memory; recent revisionist historiography; biographies of international volunteers; the experience of nursing in Catalonia; the baptism of fire of Jarama; Britain’s blocking of aid to the Republic; Soviet intervention in the conflict; and the crimes of Franco, both during and after the war.
Review from Amazon
‘Useful compilation of the last 9 years of annual lectures of the IBMT – bringing us up to date with current thinking in the Spanish Civil War as republican memory is revisited. Useful for A Level GSCE, but more so for under/post graduate work.’
Review by Peter Carroll in The Volunteer
‘Looking Back at the Spanish Civil Waris a collection of the first 10 Len Crome annual lectures sponsored by the IBMT. These include Paul Preston’s tribute to the man for whom the series is dedicated, “‘No Soldier’: The Courage and Comradeship of Dr Len Crome,” describing one of the many medical personnel who gave generously to the Spanish cause and later served in World War II. As expected, the British side receives considerable treatment—essays by Richard Baxell and Angela Jackson, and Enrique Moradiellos’s “Albion’s Perfidy” about the pro-Franco response of the British government. But running through most of these essays is a strong international thread: Helen Graham’s “The Return of Republican Memory”; Ángel Vias’s “September 1936: Stalin’s Decision to Support the Spanish Republic”; Julián Casanova’s “History and Memory …
This historical work is good—have no doubt about it—and reflects the growing interest around the world in matters related to the Spanish Civil War and its legacy. Partly the result of new archival discoveries, partly because of the passing of the generation that lived and fought the war, the new scholarship has effectively shifted the historical narrative closer to its original, pre-Cold War position.
Most recent writing emphasizes that the war in Spain had long, indigenous roots; stresses selfish national interests in Britain, France and the United States for the failure to prevent fascist expansion; and treats the IB volunteers as heroic anti-fascists (rather than dupes of Stalin). On these grounds, the Spanish Civil War was a fight between an elected democracy and a fascist-military rebellion rather than a war between fascism and communism (the Cold War version). Instead of seeing the Spanish war as a precursor or “dress rehearsal” for a world war, it appears as it once was seen by its contemporaries, the first battlefield of World War II.’