In July 1936, an army-led coup against the democratically elected republican government ushered in the Spanish Civil War. Father Alexander J. McCabe was rector of the Irish College in Salamanca when General Francisco Franco seized power a few months later and established his GHQ in the medieval city. McCabe recorded the arrival of the nationalist war machine in his diaries, vividly documenting the horror of the repression and his encounters with Franco, Nazi officers and diplomats, British and American spies and journalists, and adventurers and charlatans from around the world who flocked to Salamanca. He also observed the implosion of General Eoin O’Duffy’s ill-fated Irish Brigade, first as one of its chaplains and later mediating between the nationalist high command and O’Duffy. He unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade a disillusioned O’Duffy from returning to Ireland with the Irish Brigade in 1937. Historian Tim Fanning uses McCabe’s diaries to provide a fascinating account of life in Spain before, during and after the war, as well as McCabe’s memories of growing up in Ireland at a time of momentous change. This is the troubling and enthralling story of an eyewitness to one of the most tragic episodes in twentieth-century European history.

While writing a novel set in South America, John Hopkins travelled back there to "reacquaint himself with the scene". In 1972-3, he travelled by train, bus and boat from Mexico City to the centre of the continent, through Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua and on to Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. Hopkins travelled slowly, deliberately, savouring every experience along the way. But the journey was fraught with his angst-ridden strivings to write his novel and with the troubled love he had for Madeleine, his travelling companion. In these heat-scorched, tequila-infused pages, Hopkins paints a sultry, exquisite portrait of South America and in so doing masters an art that he believed would forever elude him.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.