First edition. 203 pp w/index. Pages browned, else near fine in very good plus dust jacket with small chips to flap folds and some wear to crown of spine. A small selection of poems with more essays and letters.

Rupert John Cornfeld He was born in Cambridge, and named after Rupert Brooke, who was a friend of his parents, but preferred to use his second name. As an undergraduate, reading history, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was two or three years younger than the group of Trinity College communists including Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and James Klugmann.

Another Cambridge student, who would play a major part in his life, was Margot Heinemann, the future historian. They were lovers, and he addressed both poems and surviving letters to her. He also had a relationship with a Welsh woman, Rachel (Ray) Peters, with whom he had a child: James Cornford.

From 1933 he was directly involved in Communist Party work, in London, and becoming involved with Harry Pollitt. During the Spanish Civil War he both recruited in Cambridge for the International Brigade, and fought himself: firstly though he was in a POUM unit in Aragon in August 1936, before returning home, and coming back in December. He was killed at Lopera, near Madrid.



John Cornford and the Fight for the Spanish Republic

By GEORGE GALLOWAY
But for a bullet in the brain on the Ebro, Rupert John Cornford might have loomed as large as George Orwell in the British left-wing lexicon...Not just a Communist, but a potential leading figure of the party, then rising towards the zenith of its power as the potential nemesis of Fascism, as well as a war poet as brilliant as he is now obscure...... I am working on an historical novel, Heart of the heartless World at the centre of which is the tall handsome figure of John Cornford......Athletic, an orator, an organizer, poet and propagandist, the best student of his generation, a heart-throb to boot -- Cornford was a socialist-realist poster-boy.

Yet he was sacrificed for the cause on the scorched earth of the Spanish Civil War The British Section, organized as the Saklatvala Batallion, sent 2100 to fight in Spain. Five hundred of them came back in boxes, hundreds more of them on crutches and stretchers.r..... One of these was John Cornford. Some of his poetry reflected the socialist realism style of the times and has little potential popularity today (though, who knows, it may yet come back into fashion). Until now the knowledge of the meteor that was John Cornford has been buried under the sands of time and prejudice. He flared briefly but brilliantly and burnt out in the flash of a Fascist musket in a now largely forgotten battle. It is a duty, for me, to see his name and those of his comrades are inscribed in a properly glorious firmament of the British section of the greatest internationalist movement of its, or any, time.

GEORGE GALLOWAY is a Member of the British Parliament,