What depressed Orwell about Spain, apart from the betrayal of the POUMists, the terror and the murder of Nin and Smillie, was the behaviour of the British press. ‘In Spain,’ he wrote, ‘for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines”.’98
