Michael Richards is Associate Professor of European History at the University of the West of England. His previous publications include A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge, 1998) and The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War (as co-editor, Cambridge, 2005).

• Introduction: cultural trauma in Spain; Part I. Setting the Scene: 1. War memories since 1936: political, moral, social; 2. Democracy, civil war, and intimate violence in the 1930s; Part II. Memories of War during the Franco Years: 3. Repression and remembrance: the victors' liturgy of memory; 4. Repression and reproduction: social memory in the 1940s; 5. Memory and politics: from Civil War to Cold War; 6. Memory and migration: flight from the countryside during the 1950s; 7. Commemorating Franco's peace: the 25th anniversary of the victory; 8. Contesting Franco's peace: transformation from below in the 1960s; 9. Transition and reconciliation: politics and the Church in the 1970s; Part III. Memories of War after Franco: 10. Transition and consent: the presence of the past, 1975–80; 11. 'The level of our times': memory and modernisation, 1981–96; 12. Collective identity and the ethics of memory, 1996–2007; Conclusion: the history of war memories in Spain; Sources and bibliography.

'Almost forty years after Franco's death, the history of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship in Spain remains a cultural and political battleground. Michael Richards, with the same rigour and imagination shown in his previous research, explores in this book the relationship between multiple memory narratives of the Spanish Civil War. The result is a masterpiece of cultural history and the study of historical consciousness.' Julián Casanova, University of Zaragoza