A crowd gathers to ponder "Guernica". Flickr/rogiro. Some rights reserved.
George Orwell once told Arthur Koestler that "history stopped in 1936."
Both men realised that the Spanish Civil War, triggered by a military coup in July of that year, presaged what was inevitable for the rest of Europe: the destruction of entire cities, the bold and violent expansion of Fascism, and a total war in which it was impossible to be neutral.
