Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 was the subject of our most recent session of Saskatoon’s best military history bookclub.

This updated version of a decades-old work of Beevor’s has received widespread acclaim, due mostly to new research and a more compelling narrative.

Beevor’s book was a welcome education for this reader. I have long known the general gist of this civil war, coloured mostly from a republican retelling of the story (and the Ronny Hawkins song below): Fascists rebels versus Democratic Republican Loyalists. Of course, the real story is much more complicated.

There were long unresolved and ready-to-explode social pressures.