Sarah Watling

Nigel Townson’s history of modern Spain begins with disaster – or, more specifically, with the Disaster. When an ignominious defeat in the 1898 Spanish-American war lost the country its last major colonies, a crisis of confidence followed, and the ‘Generation of 1898’ set about trying to diagnose Spain’s problem. Since the scope of Townson’s book

Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was one of her generation’s great practitioners – one might say agitators – of journalism and biography. She was a master of studies that are ostensibly about one thing, but are actually of a depth and range the reader is never entirely prepared for. Whatever topic she had in