Mrs. Johnstone’s book, sequel to an earlier one, deals with the last eighteen months of the war, the period during which the Spanish Government’s cause was becoming more and more obviously hopeless. She and her husband kept a hotel at Tossa on the Catalan coast, which became a rendezvous for journalists and visiting literary men, besides insufferable ‘politicals’ of all colours. Starting off with the comic-opera conditions which still prevailed in 1937, the book becomes increasingly a story of food-shortage and tobacco-shortage, air-raids, spy-mania and refugee children, and ends with the terrible retreat into France and the stench and misery of the concentration camps round Perpignan. Much of the atmosphere will be horribly familiar to anyone who was in Spain at any period of the war. The sense of never having quite enough to eat, the muddle, the inefficiency, the inability to understand what is happening, the feeling that everything is fading away into a sort of mist of fear, suspicion, red tape and obscure political jealousies – it is all there, with plenty of crude physical adventure into the bargain. Mrs. Johnstone’s picture of the concentration camps on the French-Spanish border is dreadful enough, but there is one observation that she makes and which ought to be underlined, and that is that the French Government is the only one that has actually done anything appreciable for the refugees from Fascist countries. Whereas the British Government made a grant of £12,000 for the Spanish refugees, their keep at the beginning was costing the French Government £17,000 a day, and presumably is not costing much less even now. It is worth remembering that at any time during the past ten years close on 10 per cent of the population of France has consisted of foreigners, quite largely political refugees. After all, there is something to be said for ‘bourgeois’ democracy.