Gerald Brenan – författare

Part autobiography, part travelogue, and wholly a tribute to the unspoilt beauty of southern Spain, Gerald Brenan's South from Granada includes an introduction by Chris Stewart, author of the bestselling Driving Over Lemons, in Penguin Modern Classics.Between 1920 and 1934, Gerald Brenan lived in the remote Spanish village of Yegen and South of Granada depicts his time there, vividly evoking the essence of his rural surroundings and the Spanish way of life before the Civil War. Here he portrays the landscapes, festivals and folk-lore of the Sierra Nevada, the rivalries, romances and courtship rituals, village customs, superstitions and characters. Fascinating details emerge, from cheap brothels to archaeological remains, along with visits from Brenan's friends from the Bloomsbury group - Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf among them. Knowledgeable, elegant and sympathetic, this is a rich account of Spain's vanished past.Gerald Brenan (1894-1987) was an English writer who spent much of his life in Spain. He is best known for The Spanish Labyrinth, a work of history on the background to the Spanish Civil War and for South From Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village. He was awarded a CBE in 1982, and was much honoured in SpainIf you enjoyed South from Granada, you might like Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'The best of Brenan's books: he has a true and proper knowledge of the culture he describes' Cyril Connolly, Sunday Times'A brilliant interpreter of Spain to the rest of the world' The Times

Between 1920 and 1934, Gerald Brenan lived in the remote Spanish village of Yegen and South of Granada depicts his time there, vividly evoking the essence of his rural surroundings and the Spanish way of life before the Civil War. Here he portrays the landscapes, festivals and folk-lore of the Sierra Nevada, the rivalries, romances and courtship rituals, village customs, superstitions and characters. Fascinating details emerge, from cheap brothels to archaeological remains, along with visits from Brenan’s friends from the Bloomsbury group – Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf among them. Knowledgeable, elegant and sympathetic, this is a rich account of Spain’s vanished past.

The paperback edition of a very successful and in some ways remarkable book, first published in 1973. Gerald Brenan is well known for his 'expository' works on Spanish history and literature, and now in his eighties he has returned to an early interest in the Spanish mystics to produce an absorbing study of St John of the Cross, one of the foremost of Catholic mystics and poets. The book is perhaps the first in English to combine an objective - but sensitive and lively - account of St John's life with a fresh translation (by Mr Brenan's associate Lynda Nicholson) of his verse.

A paperback of Gerald Brenan's account of Spanish literature from Roman times to the present, which has won praise from every quarter for its original and enthusiastic approach, its wide-ranging scholarship and elegant style. First published in paperback in 1976, this book remains a useful study of Spanish literary history.

Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. Written during and immediately after the Civil War, this book has all the vividness of the author's experience. It represents a struggle to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published.