This book provides an account of British involvement in th Spanish Civil War, examining the experiences of the British volunteers in the International Brigades, and placing them in a broad intellectual, political, social, and cultural framework. The event that galvanized the volunteers and the many thousands who supported them in Great Britain was the rising of General Franco and his allies against the democratically elected Second Spanish Republic on July 17, 1936.

The International Brigades quickly achieved mythical status as the century's most conspicuous example of dedicated idealism, serving the cause of democracy in peril. The early "spontaneous" fighters and, later, the British Battalion in the XVth International Brigade, which included some 2,000 volunteers, fought in every major campaign of the war; about 85 percent of the Battalion's members were killed or wounded.

Above all, Into the Heart of the Fire establishes the fact that the British volunteers were not social or neurotic misfits. Rather, they reflected in a distinctive way the political concerns of many of their generation.