The Spanish publisher Renacimiento will publish in March La civilización de España by J.B. Trend (1887-1958), who was the first professor of Spanish at Cambridge (1931).

This book was first published in 1944 by OUP (republished at least five times) and in Argentina in 1955, but never in Spain until now.

Trend wrote more than 20 books, was a close friend of Manuel de Falla and knew Lorca. He also offered Antonio Machado a job at Cambridge in 1939 but by the time his letter arrived in Collioure, France, to where he had fled with his mother at the very end of the Civil War, he had died.

Trend helped organise the contingent of almost 4,000 Basque children who were shipped to England in 1937 after the bombing of Guernica.

Presentations are planned at Cervantes in Madrid and London.

Professor Trend’s work and life was celebrated at a conference in Cambridge in 2013.