In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in coastal Palafrugell. Aspiring to be a writer, not a lawyer, he resolved to hone his style by keeping a journal. In it he wrote about his family, local characters, visits to cafés; the quips, quarrels, ambitions, and amours of his friends; writers he liked and writers he didn’t; and the long contemplative walks he would take in the countryside under magnificent skies. Returning to Barcelona to complete his studies, Pla kept up his diary, scrutinizing life in the big city with the same unflagging zest and humor.Pla, one of the great Catalan writers, held on to this youthful journal for close to fifty years, reworking and adding to it, until he finally published The Gray Notebook as both the first volume and the capstone of his collected works. It is a beautiful, entrancing, delightful book—at once a distillation of the spirit of youth and the work of a lifetime.

    An entire generation of Englishmen and Americans felt a deeper emotional involvement in that war than in any other world event of their lifetimes, including the Second World War. On the Continent, its lessons, as interpreted by participants of many nationalities, have played an important role in the politics of both Western Europe and the People's Democracies. Everywhere in the Western world, readers of history have noted parallels between the Spanish Republic of 1931 and the revolutionary governments which existed in France and Central Europe during the year 1848. The Austrian revolt of October 1934, reminded participants and observers alike of the Paris Commune of 1871, and even the most politically unsophisticated observers could see in the Spain of 1936 all the ideological and class conflicts which had characterized revolutionary France of 1789 and revolutionary Russia of 1917.It is not surprising, therefore, that the worthwhile books on the Spanish Civil War have almost all emphasized its international ramifications and have discussed its political crises entirely in the vocabulary of the French and Russian revolutions. Relatively few of the foreign participants realized that the Civil War had arisen out of specifically Spanish circumstances. Few of them knew the history of the Second Spanish Republic, which for five years prior to the war had been grappling with the problems of what we now call an underdeveloped nation.In Spanish Republic and the Civil War, Gabriel Jackson expounds the history of the Second Republic and the Civil War primarily as seen from within Spain.

    An age of perfumed harems where acts of love were spiced with the erotic mysteries of the Orient. a time when merchants, princes, thieves and whores, Christians, Islamic Arabs, Berbers, Yemenites, Greeks and Jews were trapped in an inferno of embattled peoples and faiths.Only such an age could have spawned Spaniard Alaric Teudisson - the mighty Visigoth nobleman whose extraordinary capacity for love was matched only by the violence of his destiny. Young Alaric Teudisson, has a fair, effeminate appearance and even an odor of netity. But beneath this milky exterior beats the heart of a lion. When he sets out to revenge his brother upon some Berbers, Alaric winds up as a page in the Alcazar, which is ruled by Islamites. Eunuchs, slave girls, homosexual princes abound. Named by the Moors Aizun ibn al Qutiyya, is seemingly touched by the hand of God. He was once warrior and scholar, saint and savage.

    For 10 weeks, cut off from help and outside supplies, they resisted a Republican siege in one of modern history's most extraordinary demonstrations of stubborn courage. This book is an engrossing objective chronicle of human velour and resourcefulness.