Tom Wintringham pioneered the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and went on to train the Home Guard in guerrilla warfare writes Dan Carrier

THE Spanish dawn came as quickly as a theatre curtain opens,” wrote Tom Wintringham to his mother from a field dressing station in Spain during the country’s civil war.
He was speaking of the morning in Jarama, a valley to the east of Madrid – and writing with a bullet in his leg, with no painkillers and little hope of seeing a doctor in the foreseeable future.

Novelist Elizabeth Jenkins has written a memoir at the age of 100. Here Ruth Gorb chats to her about her loves and life in Hampstead

Elizabeth Jenkins is a distinguished biographer and novelist, awarded the OBE for services to literature, but her distinction goes beyond her many works of fiction and non-fiction.
With her erudition and elegance of style and impeccable taste, she can be termed a woman of letters. She is the last surviving founder member of the Jane Austen Society, and probably the last surviving link with the Bloomsbury Group.

Elizabeth Jenkins’ slender memoir is so delicate, so sensitive and tender, so full of those small perceptive moments of truth that come from an indomitable literary life.
And the fact that its mere 174 pages leave you gasping for an encore.