[9] While the Nationalists were supported militarily from the Nazis and fascists, the Republicans found themselves economically and diplomatically isolated, forcing them to purchase military equipment from the Soviet Union.

[14] In order to obtain a passport that would permit his entry into Spain, he initially went to the headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in London's King Street.

He briefly stopped in Paris, where he met up with his friend Henry Miller, before he continued his journey south by train, finally crossing over the France–Spain border and arriving in Barcelona by the end of the year.

Orwell felt these chapters, as journalistic accounts of the political situation in Spain, were out of place in the midst of the narrative and should be moved so that readers could ignore them if they wished.

Further to this, "The Anarchists" (referring to the Spanish CNT and FAI) were "in control", tipping was prohibited by workers themselves, and servile forms of speech, such as "Señor" or "Don", were abandoned.

[20] He describes the deficiencies of the POUM workers' militia, the absence of weapons, the recruits mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen ignorant of the meaning of war, half-complains about the sometimes frustrating tendency of Spaniards to put things off until "mañana" (tomorrow), notes his struggles with Spanish (or more usually, the local use of Catalan).

In the hills around Zaragoza, Orwell experiences the "mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare," the mundaneness of a situation in which "each army had dug itself in and settled down on the hill-tops it had won."

He praises the Spanish militias for their relative social equality, for their holding of the front while the army was trained in the rear, and for the "democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline ... more reliable than might be expected."

[22] Throughout the chapter Orwell describes the various shortages and problems at the front—firewood ("We were between two and three thousand feet above sea-level, it was mid winter and the cold was unspeakable"),[22] food, candles, tobacco, and adequate munitions—as well as the danger of accidents inherent in a badly trained and poorly armed group of soldiers.

After some three weeks at the front, Orwell and the other English militiaman in his unit, Williams, join a contingent of fellow Englishmen sent out by the Independent Labour Party to a position at Monte Oscuro, within sight of Zaragoza.

He makes reference to the lack of "religious feeling, in the orthodox sense," and that the Catholic Church was, "to the Spanish people, at any rate in Catalonia and Aragon, a racket, pure and simple.

"[27] Orwell relates his involvement in the "May Days"' Barcelona street fighting that began on 3 May when the Government Assault Guards tried to take the Telephone Exchange from the CNT workers who controlled it.

A review for the conservative magazine The Spectator concluded that the "dismal record of intrigue, injustice, incompetence, quarrelling, lying communist propaganda, police spying, illegal imprisonment, filth and disorder" was evidence that the Spanish Republic had deserved to fall.

"[58] Another mixed review was supplied by V. S. Pritchett who called Orwell naïve about Spain but added that "no one excels him in bringing to the eyes, ears and nostrils the nasty ingredients of fevered situations; and I would recommend him warmly to all who are concerned about the realities of personal experience in a muddled cause".

"[58] Anti-fascist poet Nancy Cunard later wrote that the book was riddled with "perfidious inaccuracies" and came away from it thinking Orwell was a Trotskyist, wondering "what kind of damage he has been doing, or trying to do, in Spain".

[46] In June 1950, the anti-communist writer Stephen Spender praised Homage as "one of the most serious indictments of Communism which has been written", remarking that the book demonstrated that all ideologies were capable of terrible things, if they aren't taken together with "a scrupulous regard for the sacredness of the truth of an individual life.

Historian John Rodden argued that Trilling's introduction to Homage was instrumental in bringing the book to prominence, as the American intelligentsia of the period had been in search of a "moral and political condemnation" of Spanish communism.

In 1971, the Welsh socialist scholar Raymond Williams commented that Homage had been reevaluated, in the context of the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Protests of 1968, as taking a position in favour of revolutionary socialism and opposed to both capitalism and Marxism-Leninism.

[68] In 1967, the historian Frank Jellinek expressed regret that the book had been exploited by anti-communists such as James Burnham and that it had brought the suppression of the POUM, which he called a "fairly minor piece of wartime expediency", to a prominent place within historiography of the civil war.

[69] In the late 1970s, British communist veterans of the war, such as Thomas Murray and Frank Graham, denounced the book respectively as a "weapon" of the anti-Stalinist left and as a slander against the International Brigades.

[68] In 1984, CPGB politician and former commander of the International Brigades, Bill Alexander, accused Orwell of lacking anti-fascist sentiments and called the book an "establishment" denigration of the "real issues" of anti-fascism.

[68] That same year, Lawrence and Wishart published Inside the Myth, a collection of essays from authors hostile to Orwell, which John Newsinger described as "an obvious attempt to do as much damage to his reputation as possible".

[69] Nevertheless, the revolutionary conception of Homage continued through the subsequent decades, with British film-maker Ken Loach notably adapting the book into his 1995 film Land and Freedom.

Tom Buchanan comments that the film may not have been received as well if previous generations hadn't been primed to view the Spanish Civil War through the lens of "the Revolution betrayed".

[70] Buchanan was critical of the far-left's adoption of the book, pointing out that Orwell had never fully agreed with the POUM's politics and that his view of revolutionary Spain "ignit[ing] the passions of workers around the world" had been naïve, given the prevalence of dictatorship at the time.

[73] Gabriel Jackson wrote that Orwell had understood the civil war only as an analogue to the situation in Europe and lacked an understanding of the local political context in Spain.

[74] In his own analysis of the book's effect on historiography, Tom Buchanan found that research on the conflict had not entirely disqualified Homage, but had instead emphasised it as a "snapshot of a complex political situation" taken by an outsider.

[75] Within weeks of leaving Spain, a deposition (discovered in 1989[76]) was presented to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason, Valencia, charging the Orwells with 'rabid Trotskyism' and being agents of the POUM.

Observing events from French Morocco, Orwell wrote that they were "only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist trials and from the start every kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities, has been circulated in the Communist press.

"[85] Orwell's experiences, culminating in his and his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy's narrow escape from the communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937,[41] greatly increased his sympathy for the POUM and, while not affecting his moral and political commitment to socialism, made him a lifelong anti-Stalinist.