Barcelona, 1976: Hired gunmen brutally murder a lifelong friend and fellow anarchist, forcing Farquhar McHarg into a race to document an epic history before he too can be silenced. The first volume of his memoirs finds him, a Glasgow boy, dropped by chance into Barcelona's revolutionary underworld at the tail end of the great imperialist war of 1914-1918, recruited by Spanish anarchists to act as a go-between with Britain's Secret Service Bureau. McHarg tells of a corrupt and brutal Spanish regime, bent on bringing a rebellious working class back under its heel.