The Spanish Labyrinth

Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. Written during and immediately after the Civil War, the book has all the vividness of the author’s experience. It represents a struggle to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published.

Preface to the second edition; Preface to the first edition; Chronological table; Political divisions; Part I. The Ancien Regime 1874–1931: 1. The Restoration, 1884–1898; 2. The parliamentary regime and the Catalan question, 1898–1909; 3. The Liberals and the Church; 4. The army and the Syndicalist struggle in Barcelona 1916–1923; 5. The dictatorship; Part II. The Condition of the Working Classes: 6. The Agrarian question; 7. The Anarchists; 8. The Anarcho-syndicalists; 9. The Carlists; 10. The Socialists; Part III. The Republic: 11. The Constituent Cortes; 12. The Bienio Negro; 13. The Popular Front; 14. Epilogue-the Civil War; Three sketch maps; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.

‘ … shows the expert, subtle-minded and sometimes cynically truthful, in his quest of what really has created modern Spain … careful, sympathetic and judicial’. Cyril Connolly The Observer