Sam Russell [Marshall Mateer]

• YOUR July 14 issue carried a review by Nicholas Jacobs of the memoirs of our friend the late Sam Russell, I Saw Democracy Murdered.

Sam fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and was later a prominent figure in the International Brigade Memorial Trust.

In a life filled with memorable experiences, Sam always saw the struggle to defend the beleaguered democracy of the Second Spanish Republic against the combined forces of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, as what gave meaning to his existence.

That being the case, we were astonished to read in Mr Jacobs’s review the following sentence: “Although Sam’s memoir is entitled I Saw Democracy Murdered, only one of the 15 chapters of this book refers to the ‘murder of democracy’, and that is the Prague Spring of 1968”’.

This seems an inscrutable piece of arithmetic, given that much of Sam’s book is about Spain and how in the 1930s its young democracy was murdered by Franco and his fascist allies.

PROFESSOR HELEN GRAHAM
Royal Holloway
University of London
DR RICHARD BAXELL
Author of Unlikely Warriors, The British in the Spanish
Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism
PROFESSOR SIR PAUL PRESTON
London School of Economics