Franco
A work of art
Pedro Almodovar’s latest is a film about identity, secrets, lies, buried skeletons, real and metaphorical. But what you mainly need…
Legion of Babel
During the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939, 35,000 men and women from around the world volunteered to fight…
Franco’s exhumation could help decide the Spanish election
I was no sooner in Madrid than General Franco was exhumed from his mausoleum not far from El Escorial. An…
A hero of the Franco era: Lord of All the Dead, by Javier Cercas, reviewed
Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, searching for an anonymous…
One of history’s saddest chapters
One afternoon in the early 1990s, an elderly gentleman from Alicante told me of the tragedy that had occurred at…
Vile deeds and voyeurism
The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is —…
The great betrayal
During the Spanish civil war the single greatest atrocity perpetrated by the Republicans was known as ‘Paracuellos’. This was the…
