Miles Johnson

The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic, by Henry Buckley – review

issue 10 August 2013

With Spain’s economic crisis in the forefront of global news, it would be fascinating to see what a reporter of Henry Buckley’s stature would have made of its current predicament. He was the Daily Telegraph’s man in Madrid from 1929, who for a decade furiously filed dispatches from all corners of the country as its young democracy sparked, and eventually burst into civil war — finding time to swap stories with Hemingway over whiskies in between.

His eyewitness account of this conflict was never to see the light of day in book form after the London warehouse storing the copies awaiting distribution was bombed in 1940. But a handful did survive, and this posthumous publication of The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic (Buckley died in 1972) should go some way to establishing his reputation as one of the finest foreign journalists to write on Spain.

Arriving in Madrid, following a posting in Berlin, as a self-confessed ‘rather crotchety and thin-blooded virgin’, Buckley found himself in a Spain that was about to be ripped apart by its own unresolved social and economic tensions.

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