Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
SPAIN
John Hooper
TheNewSpaniards
. Excellent portrait of post-Franco Spain and the new gen-
eration - the second revised edition of 2006 brings the twenty-first-century country into fo-
cus.
Hugh Thomas
RiversofGold:TheRiseoftheSpanishEmpire
. Thomas's scholarly but em-
inently accessible history provides a fascinating snapshot of Spain's most glorious period -
the meteoric imperial rise in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when characters
such as Ferdinand and Isabel, and Columbus and Magellan, shaped the country's outlook for
the next three hundred years.
GilesTremlett
GhostsofSpain
.
TheGuardian's
Madridcorrespondenttakesawarts-and-
all look at contemporary Spain, and finds the dark days of the Civil War never very far from
the surface, even now. It's a terrific read - if you buy just one book for general background
on how modern Spain works and what its people think, this should be it.
THE CIVIL WAR
GeraldBrenan
TheSpanishLabyrinth
.Firstpublishedin1943,Brenan'srecordoftheback-
ground to the Civil War is tinged by personal experience, yet still impressively rounded.
George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia
. Stirring account of the Civil War fight on the
Aragón front and Orwell's participation in the early exhilaration of revolution in Barcelona.
A forthright, honest and entertaining tale, covering Orwell's injury and subsequent flight
from the factional infighting in Republican Spain.
Paul Preston
AConcise History oftheSpanishCivil War;Franco;TheSpanishHolocaust
.
Fromtheleadinghistorianoftwentieth-centurySpain,
CivilWar
isaneasilyaccessibleintro-
duction to the subject, while
Franco
offers a penetrating, monumental biography of Franco
and his regime. His latest,
The Spanish Holocaust
, is a controversial account of the murders
and massacres that took place in Spain during and after the Civil War - violence that still en-
genders dark passions on both sides of the argument in contemporary Spain.
Hugh Thomas
The Spanish Civil War
. Exhaustive political study of the period that is still
the best single telling of the convoluted story of the Civil War.
ART AND ARCHITECTURE
Gijs van Hensbergen
Gaudí: The Biography
. A worthy biography of “arguably the
world's most famous architect”. Van Hensbergen puts substantial flesh on the man while pla-
cing his work firmly in context, as Spain lost its empire and Catalunya slowly flexed its na-
tionalist muscles.
John Richardson
A Life of Picasso
. The definitive multi-volume biography - Volume 1,
covering the period 1881-1906, is an extremely readable account of the artist's early years,
covering the whole of his time in Barcelona.
