Ronald Fraser was born in 1930 in Germany, educated in England, the US and Switzerland, and has worked on Spanish contemporary history, among other things, for the past 25 years.He first went to Spain in 1957, living in the then isolated mountain village of Mijas, Malaga, to write a novel, published in 1960. Thereafter, dividing his time between Spain and London, he collected accounts of personal work experiences in Britain, first published in New Life Review and subsequently by Penguin.In 1970 he wrote In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes, an oral history of the last socialist mayor of Mijas who had emerged from 30 years of hiding after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. This was followed by The Pueblo: The Story of a Village on the Costa el Sol in which, through the personal accounts of a representative sample of villagers, Fraser described the changes which had affected Mijas over the previous 75 years – most notably foreign tourism.He spent five years working on Blood in Spain.

Traversing a scarred land that has endured everything and forgotten nothing, historian Ronald Fraser records the memories of survivors in this remarkable oral history... No other volume on the Spanish Civil War can surpass the power of this one.