The Spanish Civil War has not lacked historians, rather the reverse in fact, but it seems to excite perennial interest and can still raise political passions and emotional temperatures. Paul Preston has already written a biography of Franco, and a good deal of this book is virtually a re run of his previous account, but this is a genuine war history and not merely a record of the Caudillo's leadership. He was not a brilliant general - he missed strategic opportunities and was generally over cautious - but he had the essential unity of command, vested in himself, and probably more battle hardened troops to serve under him than the shaky Republic had. Preston believes that Franco deliberately stalled on freeing the younger Primo de Rivera from a republican jail in Alicante, because his death would give him a freer hand with the leadership of the Right. He also shows, interestingly, that the destruction of the anarchist farming collectives in Aragon - one of the few bright chapters of the war - was the work of the much lauded Republican General Lister, whom he describes as a "heavy handed Stalinist".