Robert capa

Tuesday

Richard Baxell

Winning hearts and minds: propaganda of the Spanish Civil War

History, as the aphorism frequently attributed to Winston Churchill would have it, is written by the victors. This certainly holds true of the Bayeux Tapestry. However, there are of course exceptions – one of the most glaring examples being the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. If British audiences know anything about the conflict at all, they will have likely come to it via supporters of the defeated Republicans, such as George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway, or having seen Ken Loach’s ‘story from the Spanish revolution’, Land and Freedom. As the German historian Reinhart Koelleck has pointed out: ‘While the victors impose their view of the past in the short term, it is the defeated who advance historical knowledge because they are forced to ask why they lost.

Wednesday

Bryan Appleyard

No one should trust the camera in the age of AI

This war is being fought with pictures more than words. The poignant shots, often selfies, of families, children, even babies, who were to become victims of Hamas butchery, the wailing mothers and children on stretchers in Gaza, the missile strikes and collapsed concrete buildings. We know politicians on all sides lie, but photography is a mechanical process; these pictures must, surely, be the truth? Almost all these photos have been taken with mobile phones. To a rough approximation, everybody now has a smartphone. There are said to be seven billion smartphones in use around the world – there are only eight billion people. (Sales of what we used to know as cameras have crashed by 85 per cent.

Thursday

Taki

The fakery of Martha Gellhorn

Gstaad Martha Gellhorn was a long-legged blonde American writer and journalist who became Papa Hemingway’s third and penultimate wife. She got her start when H.G. Wells, then nearly 70, fell for her rather badly, advised her on her writing, and paid her a small retainer to keep him up to date on American trends. She was 27 at the time. Wells had met Martha at the White House during the Franklin Roosevelt years before the war, Eleanor having been a friend of Martha’s mother, who was known around St Louis for having a mad crush on the First Lady. Yes, dear readers, sex existed even back then, but people didn’t tweet about it, they just did it.