Seventy years after Franco’s triumph, the Spanish Civil War continues to fascinate some of us. The launch parties held in New Zealand’s major centres for Mark Derby’s Kiwi Compañeros have attracted enthusiastic and diverse audiences. Elderly men and women who read about the Battle of Jarama and the fall of Madrid in the newspapers have mingled with those who were not even born when Franco died. But if the conflict in Spain fascinates younger generations, it does so for reasons that the volunteers of 1937 would struggle to understand. In an era characterised, in the West at least, by political apathy and the absence of any apparent alternative to the economic and social status quo, the conflict in Spain seems like a remarkable historical oddity. Contemporary pessimism about the whole notion of human progress contrasts dramatically with the excited idealism of the volunteers Auden celebrated. The cynical, shifting justifications for recent wars in the Middle East seem light years from the passionate ideological justifications for the war in Spain. The great struggle in Spain fascinated Auden and millions of other non-Spaniards because it seemed so urgently relevant to their circumstances; today, the conflict fascinates some of us precisely because of its distance from our experiences....