Ronald Fraser

Having described a significant segment of his past in South from Granada, published in 1957, Gerald Brenan went on to write two volumes of autobiography, A Life of One’s Own (1902) and Personal Record (1974). These covered his life from early childhood to his return to southern Spain in 1953 when he was nearly sixty, with a few final pages devoted to the following twenty years. Shortly before his death in 1987, a selection of the letters between him and his lifelong friend, Ralph Partridge, was also published. It seemed that there was not much more we would want or need to know about the foremost British writer on Spain this century.

Ralph Glasser’s and Nicholas Gage’s latest autobiographical instalments find their authors making good in their countries of adoption, England and the US respectively. The cost to each of their ascent from exceedingly harsh social beginnings has been different, but in ways that are not surprising: in England the struggle centred on class, in the US on money. Not that class and money are separable in either country, only that their precedence is reversed. Class – learning the codes of Oxbridge language and conduct – opened the gates to Glasser’s professional future, while in the US Gage had first to accumulate the money to get a university education before entering the ranks of the middle classes.’

In 1973 Ian Gibson published The Death of Lorca, his outstanding investigation into the circumstances, silenced for forty years by the Franco regime, of the poet’s assassination at the insurgent military’s hands in the first month of the Civil War. It is highly fitting, therefore, that Gibson should have now written the life of Lorca, as close to a definitive biography as we are likely to get.