A split personality

By the 1970s Ronald Fraser had established himself as an expert on modern Spain and an authority on its oral history, when that discipline was an exotic new concept. As a radical socialist, and a friend of the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, he published a series of distinguished books on popular risings and guerrilla warfare in 19th-century Spain. It was society seen from below.

But no one reading the first edition of Fraser’s memoir, published in 1984, would have guessed any of this. Only in a new introduction does he mention his friendship with Gerald Brenan, whose The Spanish Labyrinth was a sacred text to all of us who wrote on 20th-century Spain.

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In Search of a Past concerns Fraser’s life as a boy and adolescent in a Hampshire manor house in the late 1930s and during the second world war.