Between the 100 compelling pages on the Civil War and his chapter on 11-M (pronounced on-thay em-ay, by the way) Tremlett devotes a couple of hundred pages to some peculiarities of Spanish life. One in 17 Spanish men, a survey found, had visited a brothel in the past year, and so the Guardian correspondent goes off nervously to inspect a 100-girl neon palace on a motorway. In another chapter he shows why Spain is the ‘El Dorado’ for couples bringing up children. He also traces the emblematic growth of Benidorm — the ‘Skegness of the Med’ — from the day in 1959 when its mayor risked excommunication by allowing the bikini.

There is more sunshine than ghostliness in this vivid and sensitive book, which will interpret Spain to present-day visitors as Gerald Brenan and V. S Pritchett did for former generations. Giles Tremlett ends with the judgment that Spain is suffering ‘deepening divisions’ now that the past is being dug up. Other things are changing rapidly too. The past three decades have seen a ‘communal Spanish aim of becoming more like other Europeans’. As a Hispanophile his conclusion is implicitly conservative: ‘What many Spaniards have not yet learned to do is love the idea of their own difference. And that is strange. Because it is precisely why so many outsiders, including this anglosajón, love them so.’

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