The International Brigades

During the Spanish Civil War, 35,000 volunteers from fifty-four countries travelled to Spain to fight against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Spain became the rallying cry for a generation of passionate left-wingers and liberals around the world, while this first clash between the fundamentalist ideologies of the twentieth century was a curtain-raiser for the Second World War. In this magisterial history - the first of its kind - award-winning historian Giles Tremlett vividly reconstructs the experiences of a remarkable group of people who embarked on an historic, deadly and, ultimately, doomed mission to halt fascist expansion in Europe.