If you are learning Castellano and want to deepen your understanding of those who speak it (or if you just enjoy holidays in Spain), read the latest edition of John Hooper’s The New Spaniards (Penguin, £10.99).

It’s a book that Hooper, who was The Guardian’s correspondent in Madrid immediately after the death of Franco, has had to revise extensively since it first appeared, as The Spaniards, in 1986. For Spain has not merely changed; it has become a different country.

He writes:

In less than half a century, a predominantly rural, agricultural society has been transformed into a mainly urban and technological one. A dictatorship has become a democracy. One of the world’s most centralised states has been made into one of the most decentralised. A society that was intensely sexually repressed has become a notably permissive one. There has been a revolution in the roles of men and women. And, just when it seemed as if the pace of change might be dropping off, Spain experienced a surge in immigration that has turned it, in the space of just a few years, into a multi-ethnic society.

In one chapter, he explains how a country that was synonymous with machismo (though that word originated in Mexico) has come to have a cabinet half of whose members are women. He reports that, thanks to a change in 2005 to the civil marriage ceremony, a groom must undertake to do his share of the household chores. If he doesn’t, and the marriage fails, it will count against him in the divorce court; a judge will be able to rule that he be given less frequent access to his children.

The author adds in a footnote:

That same year, a Spanish designer, Pep Torres, offered a more direct solution to the problem when he created the first washing machine in the world that shares out domestic tasks. His invention, named “Your Turn’, scans the fingerprints of the user to see if it is being loaded by the same person as the time before. If so, it shuts down.