I suppose my ongoing Velvet recaps could count as reviewing culture from Spain, but I went with a book in the spirit of reading around the world. And that brings me to An Englishman in Madrid, a spy novel set in pre-Franco Spain. The protagonist, Anthony Whitelands, is an English art historian. In 1936, he arrives in Madrid to authenticate a Velázquez painting owned by an aristocrat, who wants to sell it to raise money to support Franco and the Falange. His family has other valuable artworks and antiquities, and his children do not share his political sympathies. The English government has an interest in Whitelands’s activities, and so do a few other foreign governments.
The result was a fun spy novel. The author is a Spaniard who wrote in Spanish, but he clearly knows the English and has imagined a fascinating world immediately before the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. It’s a lot of fun.
Ann C. Logue
