Rhetoric during and after the Cold War years has painted starkly contrasting portraits of Cuba’s Fidel Castro: an unblemished idealist on the one hand, a ruthless dictator on the other. This insightful book, the most intimate and dispassionate biography of the revolutionary leader to date, shows that neither assessment is true.Leycester Coltman, British ambassador to Cuba in the early 1990s, came as close to personal friendship with Castro as any foreigner was permitted. With f...

A New York Times Notable Book of the year.Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution.Jon Lee Anderson’s biography traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the h...

The bestselling author of STALINGRAD and BERLIN: THE DOWNFALL on the Spanish Civil War, drawing on masses of newly discovered material from the Spanish, Russian and German archives.The civil war that tore Spain apart between 1936 and 1939 and attracted liberals and socialists from across the world to support the cause against Franco was one of the most hard-fought and bitterest conflicts of the 20th century: a war of atrocities and political genocide and a military...

Selected as the Sunday Times History Book of the Year for 2012, this is a meticulous work of scholarship from the foremost historian of 20th-century Spain.The culmination of more than a decade of research, ‘The Spanish Holocaust’ seeks to reflect the intense horrors visited upon Spain during its ferocious civil war, the consequences of which still reverberate bitterly today.The brutal, murderous persecution of Spaniards between 1936 and 1945 is a truth that should have been...

A rousing and full-blooded account of the Spanish Civil War and the rise to prominence of General Franco.No modern conflict has inflamed the passions of both civilians and intellectuals as much as the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. Burned into our collective historical consciousness, it not only prefigured the imminent Second World War but also ushered in a new and horrific form of warfare that would come to define the twentieth century. At the same time it echoed the revolutionary ...

Lisbon had a pivotal role in the history of World War II, though not a gun was fired there. The only European city in which both the Allies and the Axis power operated openly, it was temporary home to much of Europe's exiled royalty, over one million refugees seeking passage to the U.S., and a host of spies, secret police, captains of industry, bankers, prominent Jews, writers and artists, escaped POWs, and black marketeers. An operations officer writing in 1944 described the daily scene a...

In February 1981, Spain was still emerging from Franco's shadow, holding a democratic vote for the new prime minister. On the day of the vote in Parliament, while the session was being filmed by TV cameras, a band of right-wing soldiers burst in with automatic weapons, ordering everyone to get down. Only three men defied the order. For thirty-five minutes, as the cameras rolled, they stayed in their seats.Critically adored novelist Javier Cercas originally set out to write a novel ...

An accessible biography of one of the most influential figures of recent times based on new, original research.Che Guevara is something of a symbol in the West. But for the rest of the world he is different: a charismatic revolutionary who redrew the political map of Latin America and gave hope to those resisting colonialism everywhere. In The Story of Che Guevara Lucía Álvarez de Toledo follows Che from his birth in Rosario and his early years in his pare...

Though more than half a century has passed since the Spaish Civil War began in 1936, it is still the subject of intense controversy. What was it that roused left wing sympathisers from all over the world to fight for a cause for which their governments would not give active support? In his famous history, Hugh Thomas presents an objective analysis of a conflict - where fascism and democracy, communism and Christianity, centralism and regionalism were all at stake - and which was a much an ...

An exposé of the controversial friendship between Nobel-prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Fidel Castro.Few contemporary writers are more revered by Americans than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. And few political leaders are more reviled than Fidel Castro. Yet these two seemingly disparate men are close friends. What could possibly unite these tw...

The story of one of the most fascinating women of all time—Maria Eva Duarte, who rose from poverty to become one of the richest, most powerful women in the world.Eva Perón was a star and a legend during her lifetime, one of the most alluring women of the twentieth century. Through the hit Broadway musical Evita by Andrew Lloyd Webber, her story became famous, and with the release of the film starring Madonna as Eva Perón, her life became a media obsession ...

Map best viewed on a tablet device.An account of the Spanish civil war which portrays the struggles of the war, as well as discussing the wider implications of the revolution in the Republican zone, the emergence of brutal dictatorship on the nationalist side and the extent to which the Spanish war prefigured World War II.No war in modern times has inflamed the passions of both ordinary people and intellectuals in the way that the conflict in Spain in 1936 did. The Spanish ...