Spain

Alastair Hennessy draws parallels between Carlist Spain of the nineteenth century and Franco's twentieth century fascist regime.

Gibraltar, writes Charles Dimont, provides one of the examples of how the British Empire was “acquired in a fit of absence of mind.” 

Of humble origins, Rodrigo Calderón became a key figure at the court of Philip III of Spain. Notorious in life, he gained dignity and immortality in death, as Santiago Martínez Hernández explains.

The relationship between an ‘unquiet past’ and the concerns of the present has been a key feature of recent engagements with the Spanish Civil War, as Mary Vincent explains.

T.H. McGuffe analyses the failure of Admiral Byng to relieve the besieged British forces against French onslaught.

Disabled people were prominent at the court of the Spanish Habsburgs. Janet Ravenscroft examines the roles they played and draws comparisons with modern attitudes towards physical imperfection.

To an official court painter we owe the most harrowing records of the effects of revolution and war. W.R. Jeudwine discusses Goya and his times.

Mike Thomas looks back to a period of economic buoyancy in the Basque region, when a special relationship flourished between the people of Biscay and Britain.

Patricia Cleveland-Peck tells the story of Fanny Calderón de la Barca and her life as an author, ambassador’s wife and governess to the Spanish royal family.

In the Middle Ages, with the re-emergence of Salic Law, it became impossible for women to succeed to the throne in most European kingdoms. Yet between 1274 and 1512 five queens ruled the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre, as Elena Woodacre tells their stories.

Hugh Purcell tells how Kitty Bowler, a young American, captured the heart of Tom Wintringham, the 'English Captain' at Jarama.

The British Battalion of the International Brigades, formed to defend the Spanish Republic against the forces of General Franco, first went into battle at Jarama in February 1937. It was the beginning of a bruising, often dispiriting campaign, as Christopher Farman explains.

Patricia Cleveland-Peck looks at the long history of plant dispersal between the New World and the Old.