Eliciting comparisons to Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Pritchett's meditative work on Spain is comprised of a string of sketches, woven around the author's musings on the Spanish character.Having lived in Spain for four years during the 1920s, Pritchett is well placed to deliver such a report, and his resulting narrative is both well informed and delightfully written.

A journalist's account of his experiences in Spain, revealing as

An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural artifacts of Franco's Spain True, false, or both? Spain's 1939-75 dictator, Francisco Franco, was a pioneer of water conservation and sustainable energy. Pedro Almodóvar is only the most recent in a line of great antiestablishment film directors who have worked continuously in Spain since the 1930s. As early as 1943, former Republicans and Nationalists were collaborating in Spain to promote the visual arts, irrespective of the artists' political views. Censorship can benefit literature. Memory is not the same thing as history. Inside Spain as well as outside, many believe-wrongly-that under Franco's fascist dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. In his groundbreaking new book, Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936, Jeremy Treglown argues that oversimplifications like these of a complicated, ambiguous actuality have contributed to a separate falsehood: that there was and continues to be a national pact to forget the evils for which Franco's side (and, according to this version, his side alone) was responsible. The myth that truthfulness was impossible inside Franco's Spain may explain why foreign narratives (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia) have seemed more credible than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de España was, as its Spanish name asserts, Spain's own war, and in recent years the country has begun to make a more public attempt to "reclaim" its modern history of fascism. How it is doing so, and the role played in the process by notions of historical memory, are among the subjects of this wide-ranging and challenging book. Franco's Crypt reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at what's actually there-monuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies, video games-and considers, in a captivating narrative, the totality of what it shows. The result is a much-needed reexamination of a history we only thought we knew.

“A delightful Regency read” (June Calvin) from one of Signet Regency Romance’s beloved authors, Amanda McCabe. Available Digitally For the First Time Six years have passed since Carmen Montero, a Spanish countess, and Peter Everdean, the Earl of Clifton, fell desperately in love on a Spanish battlefield. The two were blissfully married before a congregation of army tents and bursting cannonballs. But after a single night together, Carmen and Peter were separated during the chaos of wartime. Each believing the other dead, they survived the war—if survival is possible after losing one’s heart. Now, fate has reunited the soul mates—but pride and dark secrets stand in the way of recapturing the love they once shared… Amanda McCabe writes “Flawlessly crafted historical romance.”—Chicago Tribune Don’t miss Amanda McCabe’s Scandal in Venice and more of her Signet Regency Romances: Lady Rogue, The Star of India, The Errant Earl, available September 2012, The Golden Feather, available October 2012, One Touch of Magic, available November 2012, and The Rules of Love, available December 2012.

Modern Spain is a revelation in this up-to-date overview. Stanton vibrantly describes the startling variety of landscape, people, and culture that make up Spain today. Included are a context chapter and others on religion, customs, media, cinema, literature, performing arts, and visual arts. Students of Spanish and a general audience will be rewarded with engrossing insights into what writer Ernest Hemingway called the very best country of all. Spain is a modern European nation, yet Spaniards are fiercely tied to their individual towns and regions—with their distinct social customs, dialects or languages, foods, landscape, and lifestyles—more than to a united country. Culture and Customs of Spain conveys the extremes, such as the hard-working Catalan contrasted to the leisurely paced Castilian, coexisting in first and third world conditions, and the love/hate relationship with the Catholic Church. Spain's institutions are described, and its contributions to the world—from unparalleled literature and cuisine to flamenco and filmmaker Pedro Almodovar—are celebrated. A chronology and glossary complement the text.