Description
Book SynopsisNowhere does the ceaseless struggle to maintain democracy in the face of political corruption come more alive than in Paul Preston’s magisterial history of modern Spain.
Trade Review"Prodigiously detailed and absorbing... Mr. Preston is, by some distance, the most prolific historian of modern Spain.... Born in 1946—seven years after the end of the Spanish Civil War—Mr. Preston is the reigning king of a tribe of brilliant 20th-century British historians who have shaped our understanding of Spain, often better than their Spanish counterparts have done with their own history." -- Tunku Varadarajan - Wall Street Journal
"
A People Betrayed is a magisterial study of [Spain's] turbulent past, seen through the optic of those apparently ineradicable twins: corruption and political incompetence. . . . The history recounted in
A People Betrayed is a long one, but it races along in riveting fashion, replete with eye-catching and often blackly humorous anecdotes. . . . Preston’s narrative combines his gift for cogent, summarising clarity and for telling detail. . . . Preston has written an admirable book – a lively, comprehensive history of modern Spain, but also, at barely one remove, a compelling essay on contemporary corruption, which is especially worthy of attention today, as we confront an emergency that underlines what states are really for." -- Helen Graham - The Guardian
"As an historian of modern Spain in the English-speaking world, Preston has no peer.
A People Betrayed has all the merits we have come to expect from Paul Preston: from wide-ranging scholarship to a deep but unsentimental and open-eyed love for Spain and its people. He fully understands how painful elements of the past—from the country’s heritage as a colonial power to the long hand of Franco—still cast a shadow on the present." -- Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Heart
"Preston’s work is a powerful intervention in a Spanish discussion. Its significance transcends the events it brings to light, and suggests some basic re-evaluations of recent European history." -- Thomas Snyder, The New Republic, on The Spanish Holocaust
"His eye for the winning detail makes his subjects quite human and enlivens the world of political maneuvering into something other than dry history." -- Joshua Goode, Washington Post, on Juan Carlos
"It is difficult to see this marvelous, brilliantly written and surely authoritative biography ever being matched. It is a book which any historian would be proud to have written." -- Ian Kershaw, Times Higher Education (London), on Franco
