Barcelona is colour, noise, heat, dust, violent traffic and quick-moving people. Many of the men carry rifles slung on their backs… Tom Wintringham (1898-1949) was a pioneer of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and commander of the British Battalion in the bloody Battle of Jarama in February 1937, at which he was wounded. English Captain is Wintringham s own startling account of his service to the cause of the Spanish republic. [Wintringham] was a remarkable man of ideas; the foremost Marxist expert on warfare, a published poet, a brilliant propagandist… He was also a man of action who believed that few things in life could be achieved unless you were prepared to fight for them. Hugh Purcell, History Today