Ronald Fraser – författare

"He turned his back on the old man to mourn in silence this unnecessary death and his part in it; but the sight of the coffin brought anger instead ..."In 1957, a burned-out British journalist leaves London to recuperate in the idyllic Andalusian village of Benalamar, a place little changed since the tumult of Spain's civil war. But when a foreign businessman arrives with plans to develop the area, the community is thrown into turmoil.During a time of drought, the promise of a reservoir is meant to allay the fears of the local populace, but the developer has little idea what he is playing with. A local farmer commits suicide, and the investigation that follows leads back into recent history, lost love and civil war - all a far cry from the tranquil retreat that once promised respite from a world of lurid headlines and backroom shenanigans.Drought is a keenly felt novel about memory, love and the clash between the old world and the new.

In this definitive account of the Peninsular War (1808-14), Napoleon's six-year war against Spain, Ronald Fraser examines what led to the emperor's devastating defeat against the popular opposition - the guerrillas - and their British and Portuguese allies. As well as relating the histories of the great political and military figures of the war, Fraser brings to life the anonymous masses - the artisans, peasants and women who fought, suffered and died - and restores their role in this barbaric war to its rightful place while overturning the view that this was a straightforward military campaign. This vivid, meticulously researched book offers a distinct and profound vision of "Napoleon's Vietnam" and shows the reality of the disasters of war: the suffering, discontents and social upheaval that accompanied the fighting.With a new Introduction by Perry Anderson.

In Hiding is the spellbinding story of a man who spent thirty years holed up in his own home to escape execution. Manuel Cortés was a Socialist Party member, an activist in the Republic's land reform movement, and an organizer in the farm workers' unionization struggles. As Mayor of Mijas in Andalusia, he became caught up in the ferment of revolutionary Spain in the late 1930s.A marked man, he evaded Franco's execution squads to survive in hiding through a generation of persecution and terror until amnesty was decreed in 1969-a period of thirty years. With his wife and daughter, he attempted to escape to France, but failed. In this absorbing narrative, based on numerous interviews with the mayor conducted by Ronald Fraser, a master of oral history, Cortés's truly awe-inspiring ordeal is supplemented by his family's life histories and experiences during the Civil War.A haunting tale and a monument to the art of the oral historian, In Hiding reminds us what the Spanish Civil War was really about.

Ronald Fraser, the internationally renowned oral historian, turns his attention to his own origins in this remarkable memoir. In Search of a Past gathers the recollections of the servants who worked at the manor house outside London where Fraser grew up. It was the place where his parents-one American, the other Scottish-learned to embrace the lifestyle of the idle local gentry. Fraser paints a vivid picture of a vanished interwar world. Sensitively recorded, the words of his family's former employees capture the texture of English "county" life as seen from below, woven into a background of their personal lives, their work and the social antagonisms they experienced.Beneath their stories, however, the author glimpses another unspoken narrative-that of his own childhood. He submits to a course of psychoanalysis and delves into a past riven by confusing emotions and conflicting class allegiances. The result is an innovative, honest, and beautifully written account of the search for lost time, one that defies literary categorization.

Jean-Paul Sartre was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most popular philosophers of the 20th Century. Also a prominent novelist, playwright and biographer, Sartre was, above all, the embodiment of the engaged intellectual, active in a variety of political causes, as well as an individual who attempted to live his life in accordance with the philosophy he professed. It was this that gave his lifelong preoccupation with freedom, choice and what he came to refer to as social conditioning, its cutting edge. Sartre's life was in many ways an illustration of his brand of existentialism in action. In these two interviews, the Marxist historian and scholar Perry Anderson takes Sartre on a wide-ranging tour of his philosophy and politics. The skilful and part chronological interrogation of various fundamental Satrean concepts, and the detailed and complex elucidations of them by the philosopher, make these interviews a must for anyone interested in Sartre's philosophical, political and ethical development.The wide range of topics discussed also includes 'freedom of choice', his uneasy relationship with Freudian concepts, his debates with Marx, and his acute observations on drama, the Cultural Revolution, Stalinism, the May 'Events' and of course, the US war on Vietnam. Their breadth remains a testimony to one man's attempt to make philosophical sense of the tumultuous world around him.