Like his godfather—the legendary provost of Trinity College, John Pentland Mahaffy—Walter Starkie (1894–1976) was one of the great Irish conversationalists. When I met him in 1969, he bowled me over. I was then a senior at UCLA, writing a paper on British foreign policy in the Spanish Civil War. I interviewed Starkie, then in his early seventies and teaching in six different departments. He had been head of the British Council in Spain during World War II and was intimately familiar with all the major Spanish and British political figures of the 1930s and ’40s.

Indeed, he seemed to know everybody. I asked him whether he knew President Kennedy. He answered, “Nehru told me in 1961 that Kennedy was the hope of the world, but personally, I can’t stand Irish gangs. I can’t stand Neapolitan gangs either—I used to live with the Mafia in Sicily.” “But did you know Kennedy?” I persisted. “Oh, yes,” he answered, “I remember him in London when he was a little boy. I knew his father, too [United States Ambassador to London Joseph Kennedy].”

Starkie offered a perspective on the 1930s that has much to teach us today. To some extent, his view of that decade resembled Eric Voegelin’s, though the two were not acquainted. Popular accounts of the Spanish Civil War often portray it as a struggle between democracy and fascism, but for Starkie this ideological view radically distorted the facts. The Nationalist leaders, he maintained, were not pawns of Hitler and Mussolini but defenders of Spanish Spain who wished to avert a Communist takeover of their country. The Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri said in response to a fiery talk in the Spanish Parliament by the conservative Calvo Sotelo, “You have given your last speech.” A group of Republican Assault Guards assassinated Sotelo a few days later, and Starkie believed that had the conservatives not risen against the weak Republican regime, they would have been destroyed in a Communist revolution.

For intellectuals who supported the Republic, Starkie had no mercy. He had harsh words for Jacques Maritain, the great Catholic philosopher and onetime ally of the rightist Action Française, who, perhaps under the influence of his wife, opposed the Nationalist rising. Even Georges Bernanos did not escape censure, for what Starkie thought his biased account of Nationalist atrocities in Mallorca. “A nasty bit of stuff,” Starkie remarked.

Like Voegelin, Starkie thought that ideological distortions impeded an effective British foreign policy in the 1930s. Leftist opposition to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler, gravely weakening Britain’s position when war broke out in 1939. Mussolini had initially found Hitler an unpleasant person. When they met in Venice in 1934, he turned to Achille Starace, the secretary of the Fascist Party, and said, “Starace, no me piace [I don’t like him].”