[5] With a Hungarian friend, Mitchell made a long visit to Andalusia in the early summer of 1936, during a period of strikes, shortly before the civil war broke out.
"[6] While he was writing his Homage to Catalonia,[7] George Orwell reviewed Storm over Spain for Time and Tide and recommended it, commending its well-informed analysis and stating that it was "written by a Catholic, but very sympathetic to the Spanish Anarchists".
[8] The Ireland To-day reviewer thought Storm over Spain was unlucky to appear at the same moment as Elliot Paul’s The Life and Death of a Spanish Town, which it compared with The Story of San Michele.
[9] Fredric Warburg, the publisher of Storm over Spain, admitted in his autobiography that the book had been "a flop", but added that it was "the only pacifist study I ever read of the Spanish War".
An Irishman in Spain stands within that small body of Spanish Civil War writing by Irish men and women ‑ Ewart Milne, Charles Donnelly, Blanaid Salkeld, Mairin Mitchell, Leslie Daiken – whose poems and texts also performed acts of witness, solidarity and elegy.