I know that you think some of the best books are the ones that are written in Spanish, but for the purposes of this interview we are looking at English books on the subject. Helen Graham’s The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction seems like a good place to start.

I think Helen Graham is probably the most profound historian writing about the Spanish Civil War in the English language. This little book, an Oxford University Press paperback, which is a short introduction, is a remarkable work in that in a very short space she manages to deal with everything. Despite spending 40 years researching this subject myself, I found that it just glitters with insights. It gave me angles on things that I hadn’t necessarily thought about before and yet is still a very good book to read if you are an absolute beginner on the subject.

What particular insights did you find most interesting?

She is very good on the ramifications of how particular politicians dealt with particular issues. She’s very perceptive, especially on the whole issue of what was going on in Spain in relation to a much wider European experience – the dark continent where dreadful things were happening everywhere. She links them up in an extremely perceptive way. She is very keen on photography and the way visual elements can be symbolic or emblematic of what is going on in politics, and that is something that also filters through in the book. This is more apparent in her next book The War and its Shadow, which I have also read. Both books show how good she is at examining the meaning of certain images.

Next up is Life and Death of the Spanish Republic by Henry Buckley. I know that it took you eight years to find a copy of this book. Why was it so difficult to track down?

The book was published in 1940 and a few copies were distributed to reviewers but the bulk of the copies were in a warehouse that was hit during the Blitz. Maybe a few copies made it into bookshops but most of them were actually blown up. And because of wartime restrictions on paper, it wasn’t reprinted. It is one of the great rarities of Spanish Civil War literature. Although recently I have managed to get a Spanish translation printed in Spain and a Catalan translation printed in Catalonia but there is still nothing apart from the original copies available in English.

Henry Buckley was a very significant figure in the civil war – what did he do?

He was a correspondent who was in Spain during the war. But he actually first went over in 1930 as a very young man. He was one of the few correspondents during the Spanish Civil War who really knew Spain backwards. He was there throughout the experience of the Second Republic and got to know quite a few politicians. There were many great correspondents in Spain during the civil war but only Henry Buckley and the American Jay Allen were in Spain from before the foundation of the republic. They had been there since around 1930, so they knew the country very well.

Many of the articles that Buckley wrote during the war are difficult to track down because he was an agency reporter. A lot came out in The Daily Telegraph but they are almost all without a by-line. During the war he tended to move around a lot. He became very friendly with Hemingway, when he arrived in April 1937. Herbert Matthew, another great correspondent, and Robert Capa, the great photographer, were also part of his group. And actually Buckley himself was quite a significant photographer and his photos of the civil war are very important.

Towards the end of the war he met and married María Planas, a Catalan woman from Sitges near Barcelona. After Spain, Buckley was posted to Berlin where he worked until two days before the outbreak of World War II, when he was expelled by the Nazis. He was briefly in Holland during the German invasion, then in Lisbon, before becoming a correspondent for the Daily Express with the British forces. He was very badly wounded at Anzio and then he ended up going back to Spain after the war and was a correspondent there more or less until he died.

What is it about his book that you like so much?

It is really one of the great books about the Spanish Civil War, which is beautifully written, and written by someone who knew all the major protagonists and does wonderful pen portraits of them. But he also felt very deeply about the big issues. It is a book that is ultimately very sympathetic to the republic, and rightly so, in my view.