ScotlandsFest: Defending Freedom – The Spanish Civil War

Best-selling author Clifford Thurlow relives the passion of his new novel We Shall Pass – love, loss and sacrifice among the volunteers who crossed the seas to fight fascism with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Thurlow’s grandfather manned the barricades when Mosley’s Blackshirts stormed East London’s Cable Street in 1936. His grandfather’s gift of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia led him to explore the battle sites in Spain where the British Battalion gave their blood defending freedom and to write what Peter York has described as ‘something very powerful'.