Giles Tremlett

Guardian journalist, Giles Tremlett travels through contemporary Spain examining the darker sides of it's history. As well as a moving exploration of Spanish politics, Tremlett's journey was also an attempt to make sense of his personal experience of the Spanish.

The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism, and a rallying cry for a generation. Over 35,000 volunteers from sixty-one countries around the world came to defend democracy. Ill-equipped and disorderly, yet fuelled by a shared sense of purpose and potential glory, disparate groups of idealistic young men and women banded together to form a volunteer army of a size and kind unseen since the Crusades, known as the International Brigades.

In this magisterial history, award-winning historian Giles Tremlett tells - for the first time - the story of the Spanish Civil War through the experiences of this remarkable group of people. Drawing on the Brigades' extensive archives in Moscow, Comintern documents and first-hand accounts, Tremlett captures all the human drama of an historic mission to halt fascist expansion in Europe.