A Moment of War (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It was not written/ published until 1991, and thus is full of comments about how the Spanish Civil War can be seen as the opening shots of the Second World War and is clearly written with the Republic’s forthcoming defeat in mind. Lee was never in Spain during the Civil War, and that, writing half a century later, he thought nobody was going to read his little book carefully enough to detect the inconsistencies and half-truths. I'd say this is a very brave book, because Lee doesn't seek to put a shine on any of his exploits or make any grand statements about the International Brigades; he simply exists within its environment, and he suffers more than some and less than others. Also, the idea of just walking away from everything stirred my wanderlust, even though I did little about it for many years. It is in stark contrast to 'As I walked out', it could barely be recognised as the same country, the searing heat, swapped for the bitter searing cold, the jovial, welcoming, slightly bizarre characters turned to hostile, terrified and sick.

This was not the battlefield; but acts of war had been committed here, little murders, small excesses of vengeance. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.I read a sentence or two: realized exactly what was missing from Ngugi's writing; gorgeous, precise, elegant prose. Isherwwood's theme is the outsider observing the rise of Fascism, Lee a participant in the fight against Fascism, a fight which rapidly seems essential but naive, never before has the horror and brutality of the Democratic states non-involvement in the Spanish war ever struck me so profoundly "we displayed perhaps a harmonious gathering of oddities and a shared heroic daftness.

Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, he was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. It was then that I began to sense for the first time something of the gaseous squalor of a country at war, an infection so deep it seemed to rot the earth, drain it of colour, life, and sound. When he knocks at the door of the hut he has reached, he's met with some suspicion, apparently insofar as he's carrying a violin and books (incidentally, he never, never, plays the violin during the time he spends in Spain, nor does he ever reads any of the books he was carrying around).that is to say, roughly the 24th day of the journey) the whole bunch are pushed into a train, on their way to Albacete. Did we know, as we stood there, our clenched fists raised high, our torn coats flapping in the wind, and scarcely a gun between three of us, that we had ranged against us the rising military power of Europe, the soft evasions of our friends, and the deadly cynicism of Russia? Laurie Lee was still a young man when he decided to fight for the Republican cause in Spain's civil war. Lee literally risks life and limb to get back to Spain because he feels so strongly about the war and the people fighting there, but I felt the book gave no insights into this.