Lee, Laurie - Valentine Cunningham (review date 18 October 1991)

Valentine Cunningham (review date 18 October 1991)

SOURCE: "On the Road to Teruel," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4620, October 18, 1991, pp. 11-12.

[In the review of A Moment of War below, Cunningham describes Lee's autobiographical portrait as "momentous, extraordinary, [and] compelling."]

Laurie Lee's account of what he did in the Spanish Civil War—momentous, extraordinary, compelling—reads like a confession. But it is a very belated one. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, the second volume in what we are now to regard as the Cider With Rosie trilogy, ends with our author slipping through a gap in some frontier rocks and entering a Republican farmhouse with the greeting "I've come to join you." "I was back in Spain", he wrote, "with a winter of war before me." That was in 1969, thirty years after the Spanish War had ended. A Moment of War opens with just that event, those very words. But now...

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