Giles Tremlett, "El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco" (Oxford UP, 2025)

From a scrawny, overlooked military graduate to the youngest general in Europe, Francisco Franco was known for his ambition, talent and calculated risk-taking. Yet his reputation remains a topic of fierce debate. Did he destroy Spain and stifle its democracy or rescue the nation from left-wing tumult? In this compelling biography, Giles Tremlett unravels the complex life and legacy of the enigmatic dictator who shaped twentieth-century Spanish history.

El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco (Oxford UP, 2025) delves into the complexities of Franco's character, exploring his volatile relationship with a domineering father, his traumatic experiences fighting in Morocco and the formation of his authoritarian ideology. The narrative follows Franco's ruthless leadership during the Civil War, his alignment with Hitler and Mussolini and the subsequent Cold War era that brought him international rehabilitation. Tremlett interrogates Franco's transformation of Spain through a lens that challenges the conventional view of him as a bumbling leader. Instead, he argues that Franco was a deliberate and pragmatic dictator who wielded terror to maintain an iron grip on power, and whose lasting (and most surprising) contribution was the period of peace that allowed Spain to challenge the absolutist spirit he embodied.
Nuanced and comprehensive, El Generalísimo offers a fresh perspective that reveals the intricate interplay of ambition and fearlessness of Francisco Franco; and examines his enduring legacy that continues to shape Spain's political and cultural landscape.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(600)

Francesca Lessa and Sebastián Santana, "Operation Condor: The Pact That Terrorized a Continent" (Storia, 2025)

In Operation Condor: The Pact That Terrorized a Continent (Storia, 2025), Francesca Lessa uncovers the shadowy machinery behind one of the most chilling transnational terror campaigns of the twentieth...

12 Sep 1h 3min

Michael E. Neagle, "Chasing Bandits: America's Long War on Terror" (UNC Press, 2025)

While the war on terror has been America's largest and most publicized attempt to root out foreign enemies this century, the quest to identify and destroy real or imagined threats to national security...

11 Sep 45min

Charles Lachman, "They Shall Not See the Dawn: The Manhunt for the Third Reich's Most Wanted" (Diversion Books, 2026)

May 1945. The Reich is in ruins. Hitler is dead. Yet for the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, the real war has just begun. They Shall Not See the Dawn: The Manhunt for the Third Reich's Most Wa...

11 Sep 31min

Emily Matson, "China’s Date Debate: How Manchurian Scholars Rewrote World War II" (U Michigan Press, 2026)

China’s Date Debate: How Manchurian Scholars Rewrote World War II (U Michigan Press, 2026) by Dr. Emily Matson is an in-depth investigation of the Chinese Communist Party’s remapping of China’s World ...

6 Sep 36min

Valeria Vázquez Guevara, "Truth Commissions and International Law: Jurisdiction, Representation, Authority" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Truth Commissions and International Law: Jurisdiction, Representation, Authority (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines how truth commissions construct authoritative accounts of conflict, and h...

4 Sep 48min

Done in a Day with the Vietnam War: Elisa Tamarkin (JP)

Elisa Tamarkin, an English prof of high repute (Anglophilia and Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance) at UC Berkeley, joins RTB to discuss Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of...

3 Sep 39min

Whistling Arrows and Heavenly Horses: The Han-Xiongnu War

John Ross speaks with Scott Forbes Crawford about his book The Han-Xiongnu War, 133 BC–89 AD (Pen & Sword Military, 2024) For more than two centuries, Han China fought a bitter struggle against the ...

2 Sep 32min

Muy Lang Lim, "In the Shadow of the Khmer Rouge: A Child Survivor's Memoir" (NUS Press, 2026)

As a child, Lim Muy Lang grew up in a prosperous Sino-Khmer family in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, her family, al...

1 Sep 46min