The Spanish Civil War produced a variety of responses in Britain and captivated British public attention possibly to a greater extent than any other regional conflict in modern European history. This collection of essays, written over the past decade by the leading historian of Britain's role in the Spanish war, examines the volunteer soldiers, aid workers, writers, artists, and tourists who descended on wartime Spain, and how their activities reflected back onto British politics and society on the eve of World War II. The first chapter surveys British perceptions and impressions of Spain in the 1930s, which Buchanan believes conditioned most British responses to the conflict. Spain's highly progressive Second Republic of 1931 generated a new interest in the country among Britons, particularly those on the Left. But this idealized “New Spain” was only lightly superimposed on older notions of Spanish cruelty, individualism, sloth, and indiscipline—stereotypes that would quickly resurface after the outbreak of war in 1936. With little sophisticated knowledge of the country and its history, British groups frequently interpreted the war according to their own concerns: the mainstream Left perceived the Spanish Republic as a humane alternative to Bolshevism that must be saved from a military rebellion they saw as fascist; Catholics could not support a government that appeared to countenance anticlerical violence; the Right had little sympathy for the alleged Reds who controlled the Republican government, and in any case believed that the Spanish conflict had little to do with wider European affairs. The book's greater focus is the Left side of the British political spectrum, which took a far more active interest in the Spanish Republican cause than the noninterventionists of the mainstream Right. Of the thousands of Britons to descend on Spain after 1936, most were drawn by left-liberal idealism, although Buchanan deserves credit for noting other sources of inspiration: the Independent Labor Party supported the social revolution taking place in some regions of Republican Spain, and some in the Labor Party, including Ernest Bevin, depicted the war as a defense of Europe from Africans and Muslims being recruited to fight with the rebel army (11).

The remaining essays are more idiosyncratic—microhistorical accounts of particular events and episodes and biographical interpretations of relevant figures—but taken together give a textured portrait of the Spanish war's effect in Britain. George Lowther Steer, The Times reporter who covered German bombers’ catastrophic raid on Guernica in 1937, often depicted Spain as a front in a wider war against fascism (a war his employer and Britain's Conservative government did not yet recognize). Steer's Guernica scoop changed the public's impression of war overnight: it “was no longer an incomprehensible struggle between factions, but a violent assault on civilised values” (24). The story angered Nazi and Spanish Nationalist press agents, who had hitherto regarded The Times as an ally. The Guernica story would become the center of wider controversy over the question of appeasement and would lead Steer to make a mission of covering the atrocities perpetrated elsewhere by the German and Italian regimes. Buchanan's essay on the case of Bob Smillie, an Independent Labor Party volunteer who died mysteriously in a Spanish prison in 1937, illuminates the political terrain of the British Left in this period. It was unclear whether Smillie died of illness, neglect, or murder, and many on Britain's anti-Bolshevik left (including George Orwell) held the Spanish Communists responsible. Although Buchanan cannot definitively settle the case, his exposé of the convoluted investigation reveals how the disunity of the Spanish Republic provoked or deepened rivalries within the British left. Similar themes emerge in a chapter on the memory of military volunteers, which formed another arena for struggles between different leftist factions. Other chapters explore the cultural realm, with essays on individual figures such as the painter Felicia Browne and the writer John Langdon-Davies, both of whom became political activists in wartime Spain through their respective media. Another essay explores how pro-Republican writers returning to Spain after 1945 came to terms with the authoritarian regime that had defeated their cause, although the author perhaps exaggerates these writers’ roles as forerunners to the package tourists of the 1960s. Although the Spanish war attracted less attention from British artists, Buchanan indicates that it did provoke debate in Britain over the extent to which art could be political without becoming propaganda—yet Surrealism, a movement obsessed with transcending this divide, failed to gain the prestige in Britain that it achieved in France and Spain.

The author's interest in nonstate actors and cultural exchange conforms to current trends in international history, and his depictions of the effect of the Spanish conflict on British life are a refreshing addition to the often insular historiography of the Spanish Civil War. Additional comparative perspective would have been useful in some cases, such as in evaluating the role of cultural stereotypes in informing policy. Although many British elites had not perceived Russia as fully European, Britain intervened (albeit belatedly and ineffectively) in the Russian Civil War because Russia was a major participant in international affairs, something Spain had not been for over a century. Readers looking for a more rigorous and contextual discussion of how British involvement in the war connected to the broader issues facing Great Britain in the late 1930s should turn to Buchanan's earlier work on the subject. The exception is Buchanan's final essay, “The Spanish Civil War in British Politics since 1939,” a rich survey of the war's lessons and legacy in trade-union politics and foreign policy, as well its enduring emotive power. For readers who do not require the conceptual synthesis of a monograph, this collection adds interesting stories and fresh approaches to the study of the Spanish Civil War as an event in British history.