Recent scholarly and literary discussion of the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939—mainly occasioned by the publication of Spain Betrayed—has inadvertently shed light on a previously neglected scandal in English letters. This is the wholesale misappropriation and even mutilation of George Orwell’s works by a British pedant, Peter Davison.

The link between Orwell and Spain is an obvious one: the great English political critic was transformed by his experience in the Spanish war as a volunteer in the militia of an anti-Stalinist radical movement, the Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista (POUM). This small element of the Catalan left, whose name means “Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification,” fought against the counter-revolutionary forces of General Francisco Franco on a key section of the Aragon front in the northeast of the peninsula.

The product of this experience, Homage to Catalonia (1938), is considered by many Anglo-American thinkers to be the single most important English-language political work of the twentieth century. It describes the journey of a sincere English intellectual from a naïve position as an antifascist volunteer through the catharsis of revolutionary enthusiasm to hellish persecution by and flight from agents of the Russian secret police. Such a work could not but rise continuously in significance as a key, if not the key, to the moral disaster of the bien pensant progressives, pseudo-liberals, and totalitarian reformers at the end of the century.

In addition, Homage to Cataloniais a model of observation, exposition, and insight. And that is