A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain

Whereas so many twentieth-century Spanish histories begin with Franco and the devastating Civil War, Paul Preston's magisterial work begins in the late nineteenth century with Spain's collapse as a global power, especially reflected in its humiliating defeat in 1898 at the hands of the United States and its loss of colonial territory.



With astonishing detail, Preston later describes the ravages that rent Spain in half between 1936 and 1939. Tracing the frightening rise of Francisco Franco, P...