When Vivi arrives in Madrid, she is captivated by its heat and colour, a world away from the grey of her life as a lonely newlywed back in Berlin. But her diplomat husband and beloved brother Christian are here for one reason only: to bring the Nazi regime to Spain, and to destroy everything that […]
The dark legacy of the Spanish Civil War
The legacy of the Spanish Civil War is still felt in Spain today, 90 years after it began. A culture of deliberate forgetting has meant that some of the darker truths about what happened are still covered up, as Catherine Hokin explains. My latest novel, The Man She Had to Save, takes place during the […]
The Nazi plan to seize Gibraltar
When Graham Hurley found out about Operation Felix, the Nazi plan to seize Gibraltar, it sparked the idea behind his new book, Dead Ground. He tells Historia how his research unearthed other surprising facts which knitted together to provide a compelling plot. Confession time. Eight books into the Spoils of War collection, I’d never heard […]
The Girl Who Crossed Mountains by Lelita Baldock
San Sebastian, 1936; Abene García, a fisherman’s daughter, must make a terrible choice: risk being caught in the crossfires of the escalating Spanish Civil War or abandon her seaside home and make the perilous journey across the Pyrenees to the border of France. But the safety she finds on the other side of the mountains […]
Acts of Love and War by Maggie Brookes
Twenty-one-year-old Lucy is frustrated with her constrained life in Hertfordshire, teaching and keeping house for her domineering father. But she is happy to be living next door to Tom and Jamie, two brothers she has known since childhood, and whom she loves equally. Her life is turned upside down when, in 1936, Tom decides he […]
Review: Acts of Love and War by Maggie Brookes
Judith Allnatt reviews Acts of Love and War by Maggie Brookes, a book set during the Spanish Civil War which “cannot fail to move the reader.” Lucy Nicholson has loved the Murray brothers, Tom and Jamie, ever since they moved next door when she was only six years old. Now in their 20s, with the […]
Acts of Love and War by Maggie Brookes
It’s 1936 and there’s civil war in Spain, a world on the brink of chaos. 21-year-old Lucy feels content with her life in Hertfordshire, not least because she lives next door to Tom and Jamie, two very different brothers for whom she has equally great affection. But her comfortable life is turned upside down when […]
The Spanish Civil War: a war against children
“Every war is a war against children,” Eglantyne Jebb, the founder of Save the Children said. This was particularly true during the Spanish Civil War, as Maggie Brookes explains. When the bombing of Madrid by Franco‘s fascists began in the autumn and winter of 1936, women scrambled aboard trains and took their children north to […]