Pamela Beth Radcliff, From Mobilisation to Civil War: The Politics of Polarisation in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 354 pp., £40, ISBN 0–521–56213–9.

Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain, 1875–1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 358 pp., $49.50, £35.00, ISBN 0–691–02656–4.

Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire 1898–1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 269 pp., £35.00, ISBN 0–198–20507–4.

Clare Mar-Molinero and Angel Smith, eds., Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competing and Conflicting Identities (Oxford/Washington, DC: Berg, 1996), 281 pp., £34.95, pb £14.95, ISBN 1–859–73175–9.

Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 314 pp., £40.00, $59.95, ISBN 0–521–59401–4.

Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: the Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (London: John Murray, 1998), 354 pp., £25, ISBN 0–719–55556–6.

During the long years of Francoism, Spanish historiography was dominated by a search for explanation. Against the regime's triumphalist account of the ‘essential’ Spain – resurgent in the form of the victorious general's authoritarian, confessional state – exiled intellectuals such as Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz and Américo Castro posed questions about the ‘problem’ of Spain, looking to the country's past to explain the political violence of the present. For those who won the Civil War of 1936–39, Spain's national destiny was to remain true to the imperial, Catholic legacy of the Habsburg monarchy. Eschewing modern ‘decadence’ and the false paths of secularism and democracy, Spain was to remain, according to Franco, the ‘spiritual reserve of the west’. Such a vision of history, in Mike Richards's words, ‘appropriated time itself in acknowledging no distinctions between past, present and future’ (Mar-Molinero and Smith, p. 152). To Francoist ideologues, both history and the nation were understood in terms of providential destiny: once understood, the national destiny would prove immutable.