Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War - Tapa dura

A highly original and beautifully written account of the intrepid - and sometimes crazy - journalists who risked everything to report on the Spanish Civil War. Amanda Vaill has produced a work that is by turns gripping and heartbreaking, and utterly compelling (Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana and A World on Fire)

Reading Amanda Vaill's riveting and richly atmospheric account of their time in the Hotel Florida, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they had also come to have the mother of all parties ... One of the greatest pleasures of Amanda Vaill's book is the skill with which she balances her material. The result is as dramatic as it is funny. She also has an unusually keen eye for the ironies of life (Daily Mail Book of the Week)

Fascinating ... A valiant job of pulling together so many disparate stories into a fascinating contemporaneous narrative, of why people believed things when they did. Inevitably Hemingway has all the best lines ... Vaill does a good job of showing how this mixture of ambition and conviction drives her characters onwards ... A timely reminder that there is nothing more important than telling the truth (Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times)

Amanda Vaill's Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War is one of the best group biographies I have read in years. In early 1937 a very strange collection of people descended on a rundown Madrid hotel, including Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Kim Philby and Errol Flynn. In theory, they had come to find the truth about what was happening, but, as Vaill shows with lethal sharpness, all of them were far more at home with falsehood (John Preston, Spectator Books of the Year)

Magical and meticulous ... A masterful reconstruction of one of the most tumultuous conflicts in 20th Century Europe (BBC)

Beautifully written ... Vaill triumphs ... She makes the reader feel their attractive glamour, but does not flinch from revealing their preening egos. Despite the thousands of books written about the war, this succeeds in sounding fresh. Where she repeats a well-known story, she tells it in elegant and subtle prose; and remarkably, she has found new, interesting archive material, particularly on Kulcsar and Gellhorn ... Her approach makes the oft-told story vivid. And there is no dumbing-down: her depth of scholarship and organisation of material are impressive ... Vaill unashamedly focuses on individuals rather than issues. But she does not avoid the war's complex politics. She has found an original focus to bring an important story to a new generation (Independent on Sunday)

Amanda Vaill has had the inspired idea of telling the story of the Spanish civil war through the eyes of three couples ... Vaill's style throughout is unusually intimate. She glides into the characters' heads and keeps up the pace with smart asides. This can make it wonderfully exciting ... Vaill's account of the tragic end of both war and her characters is shocking and wrenchingly sad (Lara Feigel, Observer)

A real delight of her book is the way she evokes the colours and smells both of starving, besieged Madrid and the well-fed opulence of Valencia on the distant Mediterranean coast. Best of all are her characterisations. The life of the sparkling and adventurous Gellhorn, before and after the Spanish civil war (Guardian)

Written with verve and passion, and full of drama, pathos and gossip ... A fascinating cast (Daily Telegraph)

A history that reads like a novel, penned by an academic who writes like a blockbuster. A deeply revealing account of the Spanish Civil War, through the eyes of three sets of lovers: Gerda Taro and Robert Capa's stories are moving; Hemingway and Gellhorn are dislikeable but intriguing; Arturo Barea, the only Spaniard is tragic (Herald Books of the Year)