It isn’t clear how much immediate effect Orwell’s polemic had on Auden, but in 1939 he revised ‘Spain’ to delete all allusion to such choices, and after the 1950s he would not permit the poem to be anthologized at all. This is in more than one way a pity, because it robs us of a magnificent minor epic in verse, and leaves stranded and isolated a haunting phrase which many people have heard but which fewer and fewer people can ‘place’. That phrase – ‘History to the Defeated’ – forms part of the climax of the poem, and suggests in an elegiac way that the losers will never be granted their meed of honour. To them, history ‘May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’ In later life, Auden came, wrongly in my humble opinion, to think of this as an expression of the repulsive idea that impersonal or Hegelian capital-H ‘History’ was necessarily on the side of the triumphant big battalions.

Yet ‘History to the Defeated’ is the underlying subject and text of this collection of pages and fragments. Like several others in the ‘midnight of the century’, the glacial period that reached its nadir in the Hitler–Stalin Pact, Orwell wrote gloomily but defiantly for the bottom drawer. He belongs in the lonely 1930s tradition of Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine and David Rousset – speaking truth to power but without a real audience or a living jury. It is almost tragic that, picking through the rubble of that epoch, one cannot admire him and Auden simultaneously. ‘All I have is a voice’, wrote Auden in ‘September 1, 1939’, ‘To undo the folded lie, / The romantic lie in the brain… And the lie of Authority.’ All Orwell had was a voice, and to him, too, the blatant lies of authority were one thing, while the ‘folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves were another. The tacit or overt collusion between the two was the ultimate foe.

In Catalonia three years ago, the history of the defeated was finally celebrated as a victory. A square near the Barcelona waterfront was named Plaça George Orwell, while a street in the town of Can Rull was named Calle Andrés Nin. Present at the dedications were many veterans of the Barcelona ‘May Days’ of 1937, who had survived to bear witness because Nin never betrayed any names to his interrogators and murderers. The translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoi that are read by Catalan schoolchildren are Nin’s translations; he was a figure in Catalonia’s literary and linguistic revival, and a lover of Russia for the same reason that he was a hater of Stalin. The history of the Civil War that is taught to Catalan schoolchildren now includes Orwell, and has been wiped clean of any totalitarian or revisionist taint. Truth, it turns out, is great after all, and can prevail. The book you hold in your hands is a modest, individual illustration of that mighty proposition, which will always stand in need of volunteers to vindicate it.