Preston, Paul 1946-

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PRESTON, Paul 1946-

PERSONAL:

Born 1946, in Liverpool, England; son of Charles Ronald (a marine engineer) and Alice (a homemaker; maiden name, Hoskisson) Preston; married Gabrielle Patricia Ashford-Hodges, 1984; children: James Mark William, Christopher Charles. Ethnicity: "White Caucasian." Education: University of Oxford, B.A. (history), 1968, M.A. (European studies), 1969, D.Phil. (Spanish history), 1976. Politics: "Left of center but not politically active." Religion: "Raised as Catholic." Hobbies and other interests: Modern fiction, wine, "music of all kinds but especially nineteenth-and twentieth-century symphonic and opera, following the Everton Football Club."

ADDRESSES:

Home—10 Woodland Gardens, Muswell Hill, London N10 3UA, England. Office—Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, European Institute, London School of Economics, Houghton St., London WC2A 2AE, England. Agent—Andrew Wylie, The Wylie Agency, 250 West 57 St., #2114, New York, NY 10107. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Educator and author. University of Reading, Reading, England, professor of contemporary history, 1973-75; University of London, London, England, professor of history, 1975-91, London School of Economics and Political Science, professor of history, 1991—, currently Principe de Asturias Professor of Contemporary Spanish Studies. European Institute, chairman of academic management committee. Consultant to British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Timewatch film Beside Franco in Spain, 1991; television and radio commentator on Spanish and European affairs and music.

MEMBER:

British Academy.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Encomienda de la Órden de Mérito Civil, 1986; Book of the Year Prize, Yorkshire Post, 1993, for Franco: A Biography; Así fue. La Historia Rescatada Prize, 1998, for ¡Comrades! Portraitsfrom the Spanish Civil War; British Academy fellowship, 1994; named commander of the Order of the British Empire, 2000.

WRITINGS:

The Spanish Right under the Second Republic: An Analysis, University of Reading (Reading, England), 1971.

(And coproducer) To Die in Spain (documentary), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1976.

(Editor) Leviatán: antología, Turner (Madrid, Spain), 1976.

(Editor) Spain in Crisis: The Evolution and Decline of the Franco Régime, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1976.

The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction, and Revolution in the Second Republic 1931-1936, Macmillan (London, England), 1978.

(And presenter) Socialist Fiesta (documentary), BBC Radio 3, 1983.

(With Denis Smyth) Spain, the EEC, and NATO, Routledge (Boston, MA), 1984.

Revolution and War in Spain, 1931-1939, Methuen (New York, NY), 1984.

Las derechas españolas en el siglo XX: autorismo, fascismo y golpismo, Sistema (Madrid, Spain), 1986.

The Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, Grove Press (New York, NY), 1986.

The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, Methuen (New York, NY), 1986.

(Editor with Helen Graham) The Popular Front in Europe, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1987.

(Editor with Frances Lannon) Elites and Power in Twentieth-Century Spain: Essays in Honor of Sir Raymond Carr, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

The Politics of Revenge: Fascism and the Military in Twentieth-Century Spain, Unwin Hyman (Boston, MA), 1990.

Franco: A Biography, HarperCollins (London, England), 1993, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.

The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction, and Revolution in the Second Republic, Routledge (New York, NY), 1994.

A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, Fontana (London, England), 1996.

(Editor with Ann L. Mackenzie) The Republic Besieged: Civil War in Spain 1936-1939, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1996.

Las tres Españas del '36, Plaza y Janés (Madrid, Spain), 1998.

¡Comrades! Portraits from the Spanish Civil War, HarperCollins (London, England), 1999.

(Editor with Sebastian Balfour) Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century, Routledge (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor with Ismael Saz) De la revolución liberal a la democracia parlamentaria: Valencia (1808-1975), Biblioteca Nueva (Madrid, Spain), 2001.

Doves of War: Four Women of Spain, HarperCollins (London, England), 2002, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 2003.

Juan Carlos. El ray de un pueblo, Plaza y Janés (Barcelona, Spain), 2003, Norton (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to books, including Tuñon de Lara y la historiografía españa, 1999, Consensus Politics in Spain: Insider Perspectives, 2000, and La resistencia armada contra Franco. Tragedia del maquis y la guerrilla, 2001. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including American Historical Review, Cultural, History Today, Irish Times, Modificación, País, Times Higher Education Supplement, and Times Educational Supplement.

Author's works have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian.

ADAPTATIONS:

Franco: A Biography was adapted as the film Franco: Behind the Myth by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

WORK IN PROGRESS:

The Spanish Holocaust, for HarperCollins (London, England); Mussolini: A Biography, for HarperCollins (London, England).

SIDELIGHTS:

British historian Paul Preston has researched twentieth-century Spain and especially the Spanish Civil War for more than thirty years and has published extensively on this topic. His many books and articles, as well as the anthologies he has edited, have firmly established Preston in the field of modern Spanish history. Although he has lived and worked in England throughout his academic career, his voice has particular authority in Spain. Michael Ugarte, in the Nation, described Preston's interest in Spain as "in keeping with a glowing tradition of British intellectuals—Hugh Thomas, Gerald Breman, Robert Graves, Stephen Spender and of course George Orwell."

In 1993 Preston published a monumental biography of twentieth-century Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. As Preston explains in his book's preface, "unlike many books on Franco, [this] is not a history of twentieth-century Spain nor an analysis of every aspect of his dictatorship, but rather a close study of the man." In a review for National Review, Brian Crozier took issue with Preston's focus, arguing that a work of more than a thousand pages should address some wider questions and controversies, such as the German bombing of the northeastern Spanish town of Guernica in 1937 and the final assessment of Franco's merit and effects. Preston blames Franco for the atrocity perpetrated at Guernica, and "throughout this book is openly—and rightly—critical of Franco's cruelty," noted James Boyden in a review for America. Crozier concluded that the biography "is well written, packed with interesting details, and, while it does not give its subject due credit for his achievements, it does bring the man to life."

A more concise biography of Franco is included by Preston in Las tres Españas del '36, a collection of nine profiles of prominent figures in the Spanish Civil War. Preston returns to this format of multiple biographies in Doves of War: Four Women of Spain, which includes portraits of four women involved in the Spanish Civil War. Simon Courtauld, in a review of the book for the Spectator, called it "a model of even-handedness and a worthy tribute to all of them"; he added that "Preston clearly has a lot of respect for these four courageous women whose participation in the war was marked as much by their extraordinary energy as their political ideology." Preston selected his four subjects with an eye to cutting across important divides: two are Spanish, two English, with one of each on the Republican and on the Nationalist side. Priscilla "Pip" Scott-Ellis, an adventurous twenty-one year old, worked in war hospitals behind Nationalista lines while Nan Green, a member of the British Communist Party, traveled to Spain to work for the Republican medical services. Mercedes Sanz-Bachiller founded a welfare organization active throughout the Nationalist zone and proved highly successful despite competition from a more orthodox Francoist organization. Margarita Nelken, "the only one about whom virtually nothing has been written in English,"

Courtauld noted, distinguished herself as a painter and art critic, wrote feminist polemics, represented the province of Badajoz as a socialist deputy, and helped organize the resistance after the government fled Madrid. Preston estimates that of the nearly 20,000 books published on the Spanish Civil War, less than one percent concern the women involved in it; in a review for Library Journal Jim Doyle concluded that in Doves of War Preston "goes a long way toward rectifying this oversight."