Geoff Dyer, writing in The Guardian, reflects on recent war accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan (Sebastian Junger, David Finkel) and, more generally, on the strengths of fiction vs. non-fiction when it comes to transmitting the reality of warfare:

If there were ever a time when the human stories contained within...
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More coverage, this time in the Guardian, on the exhibit of Spanish Civil War friends Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington (see earlier post). Includes video.
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The AP reports: In a written defence put forward by his lawyer, he requested that he be acquitted citing a legal precedent that prevents a trial taking place if it is opposed by the public prosecutor’s office. The precedent mentioned is the so-called “doctrina Botín,” named after Emilio Botín, the current CEO of the...
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Earlier this year Magnum, the photo agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and "Chim" Seymour, sold its photojournalism archive (more than 185,000 prints) to a private investment company owned by Michael Dell, which in turn has handed it over to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. The HRC...
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Spain's dictator Francisco Franco, who won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 with significant help from Hitler Germany, repaid the favor two years later by handing the Nazi regime "a list of every Jew in his country in order to facilitate efforts to locate, deport and destroy them," today's Ha'aretz reports, based on...
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From today's New York Times:

With a drug war raging around them and an unreliable judicial system in place, Mexico's human rights activists have their hands full as they grapple with a growing new class of victims: themselves. (...) The new reality is...
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The Filmstage reports that James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano, will be producing a film on Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn for HBO, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, and directed by Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being).:

Gellhorn, considered one of the greatest war correspondents of all...
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The fundamental study by a Benedictine monk on the role of the Catholic Church in the Spanish Civil War, Hilari Raguer's Gunpowder and Incense, translated by Gerald Howson, can now be read in its entirety online. "The history of the Catholic Church in Spain," Paul Preston writes in the prologue,

parallels that...
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Just uploaded to YouTube: "Contra la impunidad" (Against Impunity), a nine-minute video put together by Pedro Almodóvar's production company, in which a number of well-known Spanish actors and intellectuals (including Pilar and Javier Bardem, Juan Diego, and Almodóvar himself) read first-person narratives of victims of Nationalist and Francoist repression. The video emphasizes that...
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Joanna Moorhead, writing in The Independent, reveals that the two Hungarian photographers of the Spanish Civil War were in love: He was the legendary war photographer, a man who alternated dodging death on battlefields with a glamorous, star-studded life-style; she was a self-effacing, left-wing intellectual who preferred to stay out of the limelight, hidden...
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