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@cliffordthurlow
DAVID BOWIE HEARS THE ECHOES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
The life of David Bowie unfolded in the long shadow of conflicts he never witnessed, yet profoundly absorbed. Among these, the Spanish Civil War stands as a formative rupture in modern European consciousness – a battle whose emotional and ideological aftershocks reverberated through generations of artists. Bowie, though born after its conclusion, became one of those artists who inherited its…
THE ITALIAN SKEDADDLE: THE BATTLE FOR GUADALAJARA
In March 1937, amid the mud and uncertainty of the Spanish Civil War, a curious and telling episode unfolded on the plains northeast of Madrid. The Battle of Guadalajara would become one of the most symbolic Republican victories of the war – not merely for its tactical success, but for the humiliation it inflicted upon Benito Mussolini’s expeditionary forces. Volunteers ready for the fight…
CARAVAGGIO STOLE MY HEART & LED ME TO THE ABYSS
Judith Beheading Holofernes Caravaggio taught me that the true artist must be brave and reckless – that he must step outside comfort, hold his gaze steady, and look where others look away. He was a drunkard, a brawler, almost certainly a killer, and unquestionably that rare thing: a genius. He stole my heart. I was fifteen when I met him. A school trip to the Louvre in Paris. The girls rushed…
BOB DYLAN AND JOAN BAEZ – LOVE, SILENCE AND SONG
The love story between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez is one of the most mythologised relationships in twentieth-century music — not because it was simple, but because it wasn’t. It was a romance forged in the charged air of the early 1960s folk revival, sustained by admiration and rivalry, and reshaped by ambition, pride and time. What endured, long after the romance itself fractured, was a thread of…
THE FIRST COMMERCIAL FLIGHT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
The Dixie Clipper takes off from Port Washington On 28 June 1939, as Europe drifted towards war and diplomacy frayed in the summer heat, a great silver flying boat rose from the waters of Port Washington, New York, and turned east. She was Pan American Airways’ Boeing 314, christened Dixie Clipper. Her destination was Lisbon and this was the first commercial flight across the Atlantic. Her cargo…
THE BLACK WIDOW OF CADAQUÉS
Javier Bardem in the film version of Before Night Falls. Cadaqués is a fishing village on the Mediterranean, wedged between mountains and sea, just shy of the French border. It is celebrated as the home of Salvador Dalí and, more quietly, as a long-term haunt of Marcel Duchamp. Over time, a procession of painters, writers and intellectuals has transformed this hamlet of fewer than 3,000 souls…
We Shall Pass – Where Stories Come From
Bob Dylan once remarked that he didn’t so much write his songs as catch them – phrases drifting overhead like contrails in the upper air, waiting for someone with a net. The beginnings of my novel We Shall Pass arrived that way. Not as a plot, nor even an idea, but as fragments: the corner piece of a jigsaw with the middle missing; a move in a chess game whose rules no one had bothered to…
THE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE TREES
The woman who saved the trees had no history of protest or training in activism, but as winter storms swept across Northern California in December 1997, she climbed into the branches of a thousand-year-old redwood and refused to come down. Her name was Julia “Butterfly” Hill. The tree was Luna—180 feet of ancient resilience, a survivor from a forest with trees older than most civilisations. For…
£292 MILLION ROBBED. TWO SHOT DEAD. ONE JAILED
A man steps out of the Bank of England carrying a leather satchel. It’s a bright May morning in 1990. He walks down the street, unaware that within minutes he’ll be on the ground, the satchel gone — and £292 million vanishing into history. It was the biggest robbery Britain had ever seen. But that was only the story the public heard. When I met Keith Cheeseman, the man later accused of…
PAGE TURNER - Review of We Shall Pass
Alan Lloyd reviews We Shall Pass for the International Brigade Memorial Trust Magazine This is another novel which uses events in Spain as the setting for its main characters, fairly accurately, and is to be welcomed. The first of these is tough Glaswegian, Robbie, who meets nurse Alice following a bout of police brutality at the conclusion of a hunger march in London. She gives him the money…
AGUSTÍ CENTELLES: THE MAN WITH THE SUITCASE
Agustí Centelles took another slow step up the steep pass through the Pyrenees. Around him, a tide of refugees moved in silence, heads bent against the wind, boots slipping on ice. Mothers clutched infants wrapped in blankets. Old men leaned on sticks. Behind them, Barcelona had fallen. Franco’s troops and Hitler’s tanks had entered the city, and a cold expectant hush had fallen under the…
OLIVER LAW - THE BLACK OFFICER IN THE LINCOLN BRIGADE
It January 1937 when the liner ‘Paris’ steamed out of New York with its cabins filled with men who believed they could change the world. One man on that boat would do just that. He would make history. Captain Oliver Law with his company Oliver Law was born in Matagorda, Texas. A shack by the Gulf. He was one of ten children, a father breaking his back for wages, a mother holding them together…
SPANISH CIVIL WAR: MUTINY ON THE LINARIA
The steamship Linaria lay moored in the winter fog drifting over Boston Harbour, her black hull streaked with salt, the boilers cooling after the long haul from Mariupol. Coal dust clung to her plates like soot on a miner’s skin. Seagulls wheeled above the masts, their cries lost against the rattle of chains and the muffled shouts of longshoremen stamping their boots against the cold. The Linaria…
AN IMPORTANT NEW NOVEL – Review of We Shall Pass
Roger Cottrell reviews We Shall Pass Published by Luath Press, Edinburgh. When I first talked to fellow Sub-Stack blogger Clifford Thurlow about his important new novel, We Shall Pass, I was immediately struck by how few novels of quality there are on the subject of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. This is particularly true since Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is also a love…
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A STORY IN STRONG PRIMARY COLOURS - We Shall Pass Review
JSC Rebbeck reviews We Shall Pass, published by Luath Press, Edinburgh. Having recently read We Shall Pass, I wanted more. I wanted the story to continue. Like one of the volunteers, I found myself embedded in the hills looking on at the terror of war – I didn’t want more of that, for it was all too stark and terrifying. Having read neither Ernest Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ or George…
BARCELONA AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Writers are either morning people who start work with the day’s second cup of coffee or night people who sip iced whisky in the moonlight. I’m the morning type and have always envied the more quixotic lunar scribblers with their absinthe eyes and knowing expressions. When I moved to Barcelona in 1984, I kept my mornings free for my literary endeavours and worked part-time for a company called…
WRITING WE SHALL PASS
We Shall Pass was a story that danced in the back of my mind for years before I finally put metaphorical pen to paper. With Catherine Skira Sagnier – We Shall Pass ‘presentation’ at Galeria Patrick Domken in Cadaques. Set among the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, the novel uses politics not as a puzzle to explain, but as a framework to explore…