To offer one example: The Nationalists declared they were fighting against international Communism.

However straightforward the issues in Spain might once have seemed, to idealists of left and right alike, they now, seventy years after the outbreak of the war, seem confoundedly complicated. But the previous point is nevertheless valid. This may be, he adds, ‘due to the author losing some of the more passionate concerns of youth’. The author remarks that he has found that ‘the huge increase in information available today has tended to swell the number of vital questions rather than reduce them’. The revision has been on such a scale that this may properly be regarded as a new book.

Since then a vast quantity of new material has become available, as a result of research and publications by Spanish historians, and the opening of Soviet files. It was published in 1982 under the title The Spanish Civil War. 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.Antony Beevor began the first version of this book thirty years ago. 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.

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.

This was Antony Beevor's first work of non-fiction, pre-dating his international bestselling STALINGRAD and BERLIN: THE DOWNFALL 1945. The civil war that tore Spain apart between 19 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 Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor