ISBN: 9780297842774    Publisher: Orion Publishing Co Year of publishing: 2001     Format:  Hardback No of Pages: 256        Language: English

When in 1987 Miranda France spent a year living in Madrid, the post-dictatorship ebullience was at its height - pornography and soft drugs were legalized alongside more basic freedoms, such as divorce, party-affiliation and kissing in the street. In 1999 she returns to make a journey through the great cities and towns of central Spain Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca and others. Much has changed in 10 years. But much has also endured, as she learns from people she meets, who include a private detective, a shepherd, various nuns, belly dancers and a Castilian separatist. She also discovers that Cervante's "Don Quixote", published in 1605, and the most translated book after the Bible, helps to explain the Spanish character: todays Spaniards still suffer from Quixotic delusions and are as stubborn, inflexible and unrealistic as they have always been.
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Miranda France was born in 1966 and was brought up in East Anglia and Sussex. She read Spanish and Latin American Studies at Edinburgh University, which included a year in Madrid. In the early 1990s she lived in Brazil and Edinburgh and then Buenos Aires, and in 1996 she won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for a piece about her time in Buenos Aires. Her first book, Bad Times in Buenos Aires, although not a conventional travel book, was shortlisted for the 1999 Thomas Cook Award. She is married and lives in London where she works as a journalist.
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