Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past

Front Cover
Bloomsbury Publishing USA, Mar 13, 2008 - History - 396 pages

"Part modern social history, part travelogue, Ghosts of Spain is held together by elegant first-person prose...an invaluable book...[that] has become something of a bible for those of us extranjeros who have chosen to live in Spain. A country finally facing its past could scarcely hope for a better, or more enamored, chronicler of its present."-Sarah Wildman, New York Times Book Review
The appearance, more than sixty years after the Spanish Civil War ended, of mass graves containing victims of Francisco Franco's death squads finally broke what Spaniards call "the pact of forgetting"-the unwritten understanding that their recent, painful past was best left unexplored. At this charged moment, Giles Tremlett embarked on a journey around the country and through its history to discover why some of Europe's most voluble people have kept silent so long. In elegant and passionate prose, Tremlett unveils
the tinderbox of disagreements that mark the country today. Ghosts of Spain is a revelatory book about one
of Europe's most exciting countries.

 

Contents

The Edge of a Barbers Razor
1
of Forgetting
72
How the Bikini Saved Spain
95
Anarchy Order and a Real Pair of Balls
123
The Mean Streets of Flamenco
146
Clubs and Curas
180
Men and Children First
202
ΙΟ In the Shadow of the Serpent and the Axe
254
The Madness of Verdaguer
291
Coffins Celts and Clothes
324
Moderns and Ruins
352
Afterword
373
Acknowledgements
383
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2008)

Giles Tremlett is the Guardian's Madrid correspondent. He has lived in, and written about, Spain for the past twenty years.

Bibliographic information