Looking for an authoritative and frank guide to Barcelona? I’d recommend Pepe Carvalho, a former cop, former Marxist and constant gourmet. You can find him in the crime fiction of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, the Catalan journalist and novelist. That enterprising publisher Serpent’s Tail is issuing this month, for the first time in English, Montalbán’s Tattoo. […]

Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that immigrants to the United States should watch only English-language TV so that they can understand the language and news of their home state.
  On the contrary, argues Joe Mathews in a piece in the Washington Post this week: political leaders should be encouraging Americans to switch off English-language TV and […]

As the Spanish celebrate Javier Bardem’s receipt of an Oscar for his role in No Country for Old Men, confirmation has come that Spain itself is often no country in which to be a woman, young or old.
   Anyone who reads Spanish newspapers or websites regularly cannot help but be struck by the number of […]

I’ve used a few online dictionaries while doing Spanish, but lingro.com, which I came across today, is one of the most useful I’ve seen yet. On others, you enter a word at a time, and have to keep switching between the piece of prose you are reading and the web page that has the dictionary. […]

Robin wants to befriend young Spaniards. He is an internet robot created by the Spanish Health Ministry and Microsoft and his job is to respond to queries about sex, alcohol and health problems in general. Unfortunately, he’s having trouble understanding Spanish.  
  El País reports today how it tested him with a couple of questions. […]

The latest Holiday Which? arrives, with an article about the Costa de la Luz, billed as just the thing if you’re looking for “a southern Spanish break without the Costa high-rise clutter”.
 That clutter, a legacy of the 1960s and ’70s, is not of course the sort of thing developers could get away with in Spain […]

Don’t judge a book by the cover of the DVD of the film made of one of the author’s earlier efforts. I nearly made that mistake when Weidenfeld and Nicolson sent me a copy of The Wind from the East by Almudena Grandes (originally published as Los aires difíciles). All I knew of Grandes, I’m […]

You’d expect to find a fan letter to Bruce Springsteen in a blog. But would you expect to find it over two pages in El País? That’s where I found one yesterday. It had appeared first in The New York Times on September 30, to mark the release of Springsteen’s new album, Magic. It’s by […]

Spanish publishers have been out in force this week at the London Book Fair, where they launched a website, newspanishbooks.com. Essentially it’s a marketing tool, designed to try to persuade the British trade to publish more works in translation, but it promises to be of interest to ordinary readers, as well as students of Spanish.
The […]

If you study Spanish in evening classes, it tends, even at intermediate level, to be language only; you’re unlikely to get a reading list of literature. So, Cervantes aside, what should you be reading?
The XIII Congress of Spanish Language Academies, held in Cartagena, Colombia, at the end of last month, threw up some suggestions. A […]