the years of his exile he liaised with some of the principal Catalan opponents of the dictatorship such as Francesc Macià. He continued travelling through Europe (Paris, Russia, England), and in 1925 he published his first book, Coses Vistes which was a great success and sold out in a week. It was a good preview of his aesthetic: "to write about the things which one has seen". In 1927 he returned to Spain, left La Publicidad and began to collaborate with La Veu de Catalunya, the Lliga Regionalista's newspaper of a liberal-conservative tendency, under the orders of Francesc Cambó – leader of moderate Catalan nationalism, whose famous tertulias he attended regularly. In April 1931, on the same morning as the proclamation of the Republic of Spain, he was invited to Madrid by Cambó as parliamentary correspondent of La Veu and became a witness to the first days of the Republic. His book of the notable events of those months - of great historic value - is El advenimiento de la República (The coming of the Republic). He remained in Madrid during nearly all of the Republican period writing features about Parliament which allowed him to mix with the Spanish political and cultural elite. Pla, who was neither an anti-republican nor an anti-monarchist but a pragmatist who wanted to see a modernisation of the State, at first expressed a certain sympathy for the Republic. He believed that the new political system could get off the ground in Spain if it consolidated itself according to the French Republican model. In due course he slowly became disillusioned with the course of events until he eventually considered it “a frantic and destructive madness”. Claiming health reasons, he abandoned a fractious and dangerous Madrid a few months before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. As not even Barcelona seemed safe to him he fled in a boat from Catalonia to Marseille in September 1938 in the company of Adi Enberg, a Norwegian citizen born in Barcelona who worked for the Francoist espionage service. She was the only person from his secretive and often meagre romantic life with whom we can be certain that he was involved. He continued his exile in Rome, where he wrote a good part of the immense Historia de la Segunda República Española (History of the Second Spanish Republic) - an assignment for Francesc Cambó, one of the financiers of