The publication of Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth in 1943 turned an indifferent novelist and second-rate poet, known only to a limited circle of friends and admirers, into a cultural hero. Apart from squeals from outraged Catholics – Brenan later took a more favourable view of the Catholic church as the bastion of the Spanish ‘intractability’ he admired – and from the far right, the reviews verged on the ecstatic. The book was hailed ‘as one of the most brilliant political and social studies in many years’ (Chicago Sunday Tribune), as ‘the essence of Spain’ (Manchester Guardian). Then, in the 1960s, after the publication of a Spanish translation in Paris which was quickly smuggled into Francoist Spain, it became a sacred text for the democratic opposition to Franco. The Labyrinth, as it were lived two lives. One in the Anglo-Saxon world and another in Spain itself.

Its instant success in the Anglo-Saxon world can be explained by the extraordinary fact that in 1943 modern Spain was the only major European country lacking a history which was not a barren political chronicle; lacking any analysis of social structures or the class struggle, such dry compilations were dismissed by Marx as mere ‘court histories’. Brenan was obsessed with the unique nature of Spanish society, and since his left-wing leanings led him to treat working-class movements at length and with sympathy, his book reflected these social concerns. It therefore came as a revelation to my generation, still scarred by the memory of the defeat of the democratic Republic in the Spanish Civil War and bitterly hostile to a regime whose public support of the Axis powers in the Second World War was notorious. It seemed the definitive interpretation of modern Spain.