Every so often I’ll look up what certain twentieth-century intellectuals said of Francisco Franco. I’m always struck by how many of them were fooled by him: they swooned, like innocent debutantes, when the blue-shirted Falange marched past. To my mind, this “Franco test” is for the political right what the Stalinist show trials were for the Left — it is hard to really admire those who failed it. Can you guess who said the following?

I saw that Franco had made a heroic and colossal attempt to save his country from disintegration. With this understanding there also came amazement: there had been destruction all around, but with firm tactics, Franco had managed to have Spain sidestep the Second World War without involving itself, and for twenty, thirty, thirty-five years, had kept Spain Christian against all history’s laws of decline! But then in the thirty-seventh year of his rule he died, dying to a chorus of nasty jeers from the European socialists, radicals, and liberals.

Those were the words of the famed Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is often said that Solzhenitsyn had personal reasons to loathe the NKVD, his country’s secret service, and any government, like the Second Spanish Republic’s, that looked to it for support. But Solzhenitsyn — who never hesitated to praise the KGB’s Vladimir Putin — was by no means the only darling of the Right to fail the Franco test.