On the cover of Nick Lloyd’s new book, Travels Through the Spanish Civil War (Hurst, £17.99, November 20), is a picture taken by a Catalan photographer, Agustí Centelles, in Aragón in the summer of 1937. Centelles was travelling from what was then Spain’s only industrial metropolis of Barcelona to the front by car, perhaps a Ford, and the image was shot on his state-of-the-art Leica III camera through the windscreen. Outside is an older Spain: a column of Republican troops riding horses towards him on both sides of a dusty road. The photo, Lloyd says, expresses what he’s trying to do with the book. Fifty years after the death of Franco (on November 20, 1975), and almost 90 since the Civil War began, the scars of violence still run deep in Spain. Lloyd’s aim is to trace this legacy by travelling into the past through a series of road trips, mainly in Catalonia and Aragón, within three hours’ drive of his home in Barcelona.

Lloyd hails from Stockport, Greater Manchester, but has lived in Spain for nearly 40 years. “Bored stiff” of teaching English and translating, he began leading war tours in his adopted city, which led to his writing debut: Forgotten Places. In his new book, he visits battle sites, museums and memorials, and speaks to historians, local guides and descendants of International Brigaders. As debates over “historical memory” highlight enduring political rifts, he “powerfully chronicles how war is remembered—or not—in Spain and beyond”. Early readers include the historian Paul Preston, one of the foremost authorities on the war, who says the book is “Truly original and, at the same time, compellingly readable.” The journalist Paul Mason (author of How To Stop Fascism) says Lloyd’s “vivid and thrilling journey… reminds us what was at stake for those who fought fascism, and what’s at stake as we resist its return today”.