In April and October last year, the Spanish online newspaper OK Diario published two stories including completely false statements about me, in particular about my alleged contacts with Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez - I have never met Pedro Sanchez, or communicated with him at all ( Read more... )

The second paragraph of the third chapter is so long that it's almost a short story in its own right, at more than 500 words both in English and in the original Spanish:En realidad aquel día no tenía turno de guardia, pero lo cambió con un compañero porque le resultaba muy duro pasar sola en casa una Nochevieja por primera vez en su vida. Fueron ( Read more... )

These emerged from my recent survey as the best-known books set in Iceland and Spain respectively. They actually have some elements in common - both are about untangling decades-old family secrets, involving sex, violence and intellectual endeavour.

In Jar City, the intellectual endeavour is science, both forensic medicine and the Icelandic ( Read more... )

See note on methodologyYou may have thought you knew the answer to this - I certainly thought I did. However, the users of Goodreads and LibraryThing, taken en masse, do not always have the same tastes as you or me (this may have become apparent in previous posts). On both systems, the book most widely owned which has a partially Spanish setting is ( Read more... )

Catalonia, our country, is a nation. A nation that, in order to maintain its identity and to move forward, needs tools of state. This nation has existed for many centuries. It has its own identity, culture, and language, and its own institutions. Catalonia wants to follow, and indeed must be allowed to follow, its own path.

(Artur Mas i Gavarro, ( Read more... )

I didn't know a lot about the Spanish Inquisition before reading this fairly comprehensive but also short (221 pages) account. Pérez gives plenty of detail on how it operated, as a powerful and brutal autnomous judicial system within the Spanish state, from 1480 to 1834 (admittedly rather gutted of its authority in its final decades). Several ( Read more... )