Navigate / search

Review of Sarah Watling’s Tomorrow Perhaps the Future

The cover of Sarah's Watling's Tomorrow Perhaps the Future, with Gerdaa Taro's famous photograph of a kneeling Republican militiawoman aiming a pistol

‘We English,’ Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin allegedly remarked, following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, ‘hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So, if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better.’ Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin’s comment, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war. However, a sizeable minority saw things very differently, believing that the conflict was not just a civil war, but part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and fascism. To them Spain became a rallying cry and over the course of the war many thousands of people from around the world volunteered to go. The majority fought in the Communist controlled International Brigades, but others went to report on the conflict, as part of ‘fact-finding missions’ or simply to show their support for the Spanish government’s cause …

My review of Sarah Watling‘s study of ‘writers and rebels’ in the Spanish Civil War appears in The Spectator.