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Books

There was good art under Franco

A review of Jeremy Treglown’s Franco’s ‘Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936’. A lot of the great art and film made under Franco’s regime has been unfairly tainted by association

12 April 2014

9:00 AM

12 April 2014

9:00 AM

Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 Jeremy Treglown

Chatto and Windus, pp.320, £25, ISBN: 9780701180621

Everyone knows about the Spanish civil war, first battlefield in the struggle that broke out in 1936 and ended nine years later in the ruins of Berlin. It has been immortalised in the work of Hemingway, Orwell and Koestler and commemorated in the heroic deeds of the International Brigades. This is how it is remembered by Camilo José Cela, the conservative novelist and Nobel Prize winner:

To the conscripts of 1937, all of whom lost something: their life, their freedom, their dreams, their hope, their decency.

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