As a biographer, I’m often more puzzled than enlightened by personal interviews. Establishing the facts is tricky enough, and the truth can be elusive. The people I talk to may be old, in frail health, or have failing memories. They sometimes “remember” what’s been written or said instead of what actually happened, or say what they think I want to hear. They may even lie to make themselves look better. Recently, I came across a new difficulty in literary biography: ideological blindness.

I went to England last November to do research for a life of George Orwell. I had the names of two men, Frank Frankford and Sam Lesser, who’d fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Frankford, who’d been in the Anarchist POUM (United Marxist Workers Party) militia with Orwell, and who was now aged eighty-five, had agreed to see me; but I didn’t know anything about Lesser, or if he was still alive. After talking to them I realized that the two men, fighting on different fronts, Barcelona and Madrid, had in fact been intimately connected. Lesser had changed the life of Frankford, and Frankford had been searching for him for the last sixty years.

I knew that Frankford had played a notorious role in Orwell’s life. In 1937 Frankford was arrested in Barcelona for trying to sell paintings stolen from museums or looted from churches. After his release from jail with the help of an English intermediary, the British Daily Workerof September