Simon Leys reviews new editions of George Orwell's diaries and letters in the latest issue of the New York Review:
Blair’s personal life and Orwell’s public activity both reflected one powerfully single-minded personality. Blair-Orwell was made of one piece: a recurrent theme in the testimonies of all those who knew him at...
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The Guardian's Giles Tremlett explains the significance of the new national map identifying thousands of mass grave sites in Spain, which was published last week:
Presenting the results of almost four years of work, the interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, said: "No human being should be buried in a ditch." Not...
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The new film by Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, The Mission) tells the story of Josémaría Escrivá, the founder of the militant secular order Opus Dei, whose members formed the institutional backbone of the Franco regime, is attracting a lot of media attention. This past week it has been reviewed--not very enthusiastically--in the
Our friends at the International Brigades Memorial Trust in the UK send along their latest newsletter featuring, among other things: news on the IB musical, "Goodbye Barcelona"; some interesting insights on Harry Potter & the Spanish Civil War; a review of Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust; a profile of Janet Vaughan, who...
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Gert Hoffmann, the Austrian International Brigader, will be turning 94 soon. He sends us the following note :
Reflecting on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, I recall the hopes we had in that moment of great relief, of peace finally regained. But I wonder--I have wondered for decades--whether...
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The BBC commemorated the 74th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica last week with a radio program. Listen to the podcast here.
The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has announced that judge Baltasar Garzón--currently suspended from his post in Spain and working as special advisor to the International Criminal Court--may play an observer's role in the reform of the Ecuadorian judiciary, the Americas Society reports. Garzón visited the country last week. Ecuador is getting ready...
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The University of Iowa Press has just published Hemingway's Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War by Alex Vernon:
In 1937 and 1938, Ernest Hemingway made four trips to Spain to cover its civil war for the North American News Alliance wire service and to help create the pro-Republican documentary...
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Today the Spanish government released an online, interactive national map detailing the location of Civil War events as well as thousands of mass graves that have been identified over the past dozen years, thanks in large part to the efforts of grassroots organizations such as the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria...
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Manuel Rivas's interview with Garzón, filmed by Isabel Coixet last fall and screened at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, is now available for viewing online at Filmin.es for a modest fee (90 min., Spanish, 2.95 euros). See it here.
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
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My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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Peter Verburgh’s translation from the French Newpaper Le Journal about a group of 29 Americans arrested in France. “29 American Volunteers Arrested in Muret” Le Journal, 5 April 1937 Toulouse, 4 April- The Control services of the Non-Intervention Committee do not remain inactive, especially with the help of the French Police and Gendarmerie. Thus...
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ALBA Board Member Steve Birnbaum made the trek on Memorial Day to the Home of Eternity Cemetary in Oakland, California to pay tribute to ALB veteran Hans Joachim. Joachim was born in Berlin, Germany in 1906 and moved to the US in 1924. He served in Spain with the George Washington Battalion and later...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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