Last of the brigade

In a century of horrors which included two world wars, the Holocaust, the Stalin terror and Hiroshima, one event stands out like a blazing beacon: the Spanish civil war. Some 2,400 British men and women travelled to Spain in the 1930s to fight in the civil war against fascism. The Guardian has interviewed 23 of the 40 survivors. Here are their accounts. Ian Aitken introduces our interviews with the last survivors. Pictures by Eamonn McCabe.



