The civil war that tore Spain apart between 1936 & 1939 & attracted liberals & socialists from across the world to support the cause against Franco was one of the most hard-fought & bitterest conflicts of the 20th century: a war of atrocities & political genocide & a military testing ground before WWII for the Russians Italians & Germans whose Condor Legion so notoriously destroyed Guernica. Antony Beevor's account narrates the origins of the Civil War & its violent & dramatic course from the coup d'etat in July 1936 through the savage fighting of the next three years which ended in catastrophic defeat for the Republicans in 1939. & he succeeds especially well in unravelling the complex political & regional forces that played such an important part in the origins & history of the war.