Book description
When in 1987 Miranda France spent a year living in Madrid, the
post-dictatorship ebullience was at its height. Pornography and soft
drugs were legalised alongside more basic freedoms, such as divorce,
party-affiliation and kissing in the street. In 1998 she returned to
make a journey through the great cities and towns of central Spain -
Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca and others. With the new prosperity,
much has changed. But much has also endured, as she learns from the
people she meets, who include a private detective, a shepherd, various
nuns, two belly dancers and a Castilian separatist. She also discovers
that Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE' published in 1605 and the most translated
book after the Bible - is a work of genius which still helps to explain
the Spanish character: today's Spaniards still suffer from Don Quixote's
delusions, and are as stubborn, inflexible and unrealistic as they have
always been. Miranda France was born in 1966 and was brought up in
East Anglia and Sussex. She read Spainsh 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, was
published in 1998. She lives with her husband and young son in London
