The Spanish Labyrinth

SOBER and dispassionate, buttressed by historical knowledge and personal experience, this thoroughgoing account of the political, economic, and social background of the Spanish Civil War would be an excellent companion piece to For Whom the Bell Tolls, with its fire and passion and color. WTiiIe the author’s sympathies are with the Republicans, he writes with an objectivity that is unusual among foreign observers of the turbulent Spanish scene. He sees the same streak of intransigent fanatical idealism in the anarchists of Barcelona and in the romantic monarchists of Navarre, the Carlists. There is an interesting account of the curiously conservative role of the Communists in the Civil War.