Ronald Fraser, who has died aged 81, was one of the most respected, gifted and prolific British historians of Spain. His best-known work, Blood of Spain (1979), is a peerless account of the Spanish civil war, carefully constructed from interviews with participants on both sides. Conducted with a steady and consistently courteous voice, the book helped establish oral history as a discipline in its own right. Ronnie disliked the description – "as though it were a category of historiography on a par with 'economic' or 'political' history rather than what it actually is: the creation of new sources to further historical research."
His last work, Napoleon's Cursed War (2008), a magisterial reconstruction of the Peninsular war of 1808-1814, followed the same principle, but this time he was compelled to dig deep in the archives to find the voices and actions of common people.
Ronnie was born in Hamburg to a Scottish father who worked for a shipping line and an American mother, an heiress whose fortune helped to purchase the manor house at Burghfield, Berkshire, in which they lived after they left Germany in 1933. His brother Colin was born two years later.
His father was determined that his boys should acquire the outlook of the conservative gentry. Neither of them did. If Ronnie never got on with his father, nor did his mother. She divorced him and married a New Zealand doctor. After the sudden death of her second husband, she settled down with Tom Harper, an RAF bomber pilot.
Years later, Ronnie returned to the English countryside, fictionalising Burghfield as Amnersfield, in Hampshire, to investigate "the intimate sense of nullity that an English childhood had left me with". In Search of a Past (1984, reprinted in 2010) connected memories of his own childhood, aided by psychoanalysis, with those of the eight domestic staff who had collectively parented him during his early years. It is an unusually gripping memoir.
He went to local prep and public schools and, after national service, worked for some years in the mid-1950s at the Reuters news agency. The world of deadlines, however, did not agree with him. It left too little time for serious reflection, and he had already begun his lifelong love affair with Spain, inspired by the writings of Gerald Brenan, who later became a close friend.
After his mother's death, and with an inheritance, Ronnie moved to Andalusia: "It was 1957 – the year, as I later learned, that Spanish agricultural output reached pre-civil war levels. Nothing in the impoverished Andalusian mountain village of Mijas where I had come to rest indicated recuperation from the war which had ended 18 years earlier."
It was here, purely by chance, that he met a young Frenchman, André Gorz, the author of Le Traître (The Traitor), an exploration of autobiography and theory. He developed an intellectual intimacy with Gorz, who was then a journalist with L'Express and was later celebrated as a social philosopher and pioneer of political ecology. This led Ronnie to Paris.
The political mood on Paris's Left Bank was difficult to resist. It was the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and his circle that turned Ronnie into a lifelong socialist. And it was Gorz who introduced his new English friend to Soho and the New Left Review in 1963. There he met fellow political outcasts; home at last.
The magazine was in the process of being transformed, and Ronnie's previously untapped business skills enabled it to survive. He became the business manager and later helped to set up New Left Books/Verso. For the magazine, he pioneered interviews with working people, pre-dating Studs Terkel on this front, describing what work was and what it meant to their lives. In 1968 Penguin published a collection, Work: Twenty Personal Accounts, which was unique for its time.
Ronnie's political conscience never waned. As a senior member of the New Left Trust, he would regularly ring to inquire about the financial health of the two outfits.
He had three children, Mark, Joseph and Jessica, with, respectively, his first wife, Fern Fraser; his literary agent, Charlotte Wolfers; and Rosalind van der Beek. For the last 25 years he lived happily with his second wife, Aurora Bosch, a historian, in her native Valencia.
Ronnie would ring me and rage at how provincial the Valencians were, even more so than the English, but they loved him nonetheless. He was the Spanish Englishman who knew their country better than most and a very elegant and, in some ways, old-fashioned Englishman at that. He is survived by Aurora and his children.
• Ronald Fraser, historian, born 9 December 1930; died 10 February 2012
• This piece was amended on 17 February 2012 to include mention of the real-life village where Ronald Fraser grew up, and of his son Joseph. Ronald was not a Guards officer during his national service, and worked at Reuters for some years rather than a short time. These points and the spelling of Rosalind van der Beek's surname have been corrected.
