[1] (In the BBC dramatisation Cambridge Spies he appears as Blunt's lover and Guy Burgess's unrequited love interest).

[3] His parents and his aunt Virginia tried to dissuade him; eventually, they persuaded Julian to get a job as an ambulance driver on the Republican side, rather than a soldier.

[3] His motive for going to Spain was general sympathy for the cause of the Spanish Republic, plus "the usefulness of war experience in the future and the prestige one would gain in literature and – even more – Left politics".

[4] After just a month in Spain he found himself in the thick of the action, driving an ambulance for the British Medical Unit attached to the International Brigades at the Battle of Brunete.

He was hit by bomb fragments on a stretch of road just outside Villanueva de la Cañada, sustaining a massive lung wound, and later died in a military hospital at El Escorial.