Books published by Clapton Press Limited

Jan Kurzke was a left-wing artist who fled Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and tramped round the south of Spain, witnessing first-hand the poverty of the rural population. He eventually found his way to London. When the Spanish civil war broke out in 1936, he went back and joined the International Brigade, to defend the democratically elected Republic. Many of his fellow volunteers died in the savage battles on the outskirts of Madrid and Jan himself was seriously wounded at Boadilla, nearly losing his leg. He was dragged off the battlefield by the poet John Cornford, who was killed a few weeks later. For several months, Jan was shunted between various military hospitals in Spain, eventually making his way across the border into France. This is his previously unpublished memoir.

First published in 1946, Marguerite Reilly traces the story of an Irish immigrant family across four generations, from the time of the Irish famine up to the second world war, as they struggle to survive and educate their children. A "must read" for anyone with Anglo-Irish heritage. "The book engages the reader's attention from the first page. It is acutely observed and beautifully written" - The Spectator"A formidable piece of characterisation" - The Fifeshire Advertiser"A dominating, deplorable and heroic character, on a scale that English fiction seldom affords" - Elizabeth Bowen, The TatlerElizabeth Lake was the pen-name adopted by Inez Pearn, a girl from a working-class background who won a scholarship to Oxford in the 1930s to study Spanish literature. She was active in the campaign for Britain to support the Spanish Republic and was later involved in the Mass Observation movement. She wrote five novels. Along the way she mixed with a host of contemporary artists and intellectuals, including Marghanita Laski, Sally Graves, Phillip Toynbee, A J Ayer, the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy and the painter Sir William Coldstream, whose portrait of her is held in the Tate Britain. She was briefly married to Stephen Spender and subsequently, more enduringly, to the poet and sociologist Charles Madge.