In order to understand Lorca's politics we need to set him in the context of his times and to consider the events that shaped the sensibilities of the entire generation of writers to which he belonged. It is true that the collective experience cannot fully explain the sense of every individual case but it can legitimately draw attention to the range of social and historical circumstances to which all alert intellectuals of those years responded, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively, as they took stock of their place in the world and tried to define their role in it. Lorca was never a protagonist of political events, but nor was he an indifferent or neutral observer of them. Like his contemporaries, he reacted to what occurred around him and was prepared, when he thought the situation required it, to go on public record and state his beliefs, lending his support to a particular initiative or voicing his opposition to an incident or situation that troubled him. This did not necessarily make him a political writer, and we need to distinguish carefully between Lorca the man and Lorca the writer, between what the former said and what the latter wrote. It is easy to succumb to the temptation of hoisting an ideological agenda on to Lorca's writing in order to appropriate him for particular political ends. This happened during his lifetime and has certainly happened since his death, the circumstances of which transformed him, for better or for worse, into the martyred champion of a political cause. But we doubtless diminish his writings by stressing only the political charge they often seem to carry or can be made to bear. It is not the same, after all, to express an ethical impulse in favour of social justice and individual fulfilment as it is to be a revolutionary writer committed to the dissemination of a partisan political programme. We would do well to acknowledge at the beginning of this discussion that any approach to Lorca is bound to be partial, provisional and problematic. This is partly because of the complexity and elusiveness of the man, who oscillated between playing the public role of joyful entertainer and retreating into an intensely private world of acute uncertainties.