The Spanish Civil War hotel that Capa, Hemingway and Gelhorn called home

In February 1924 the Hotel Florida, a ten- storey marble-clad building with 200 rooms, a glass-roofed atrium and red plush furnishings, went up on Madrid’s Gran Via. Along with the Ritz in Paris, certainly the most celebrated hotel in the literary world, the Florida became, during the two-year battle for the capital waged between Franco’s nationalists and the republican forces, the meeting place for an eccentric, glamorous and self-important assortment of war tourists, zealots, opportunists, romantics, dreamers, buccaneers and writers who had come to observe the fighting, file dispatches of variable truthfulness and proclaim loyalty to the republic. In its own way, the Florida has become as emblematic of the Spanish civil war as Robert Capa’s controversial photograph of the militia soldier shot as he leaps across a ditch.

Six of its visitors form the basis of Amanda Vaill’s new account of the war, brought to the Florida by a shared commitment to the cause and their own particular ambitions and dreams.