A brilliant new portrait of the Spanish Civil War from our greatest historian of Spain.

A bravura new interpretation of the course, causes and characters of the Spanish Civil War, still the twentieth century's bloodiest internal conflict

Analysis of the Civil War has always focused on victors and vanquished, but what of those who eschewed the struggle, those who stood apart from the carnage and chaos? Was there a Third Way?

Starting at the extreme right of the political spectrum and moving across it to the extreme left, using the emblematic lives of ten key individuals, Preston builds up an astonishingly vivid picture of how the War came to pass, and how those who started, suffered and stopped it were coloured by the experience

Here are brilliant psychological profiles of the communist firebrand La Pasionaria, of the canny falangist Primo de Rivera, of the aloof intellectual non-participant Salvador Madariaga, and of the enigma himself, Generalissimo Franco

Preston finds his finest prose style yet in this scintillating book