When the little train murmured to a halt at Almorchón (a sort of Extremaduran Adelstrop, with a population of 32) “no one got off. No one got on,” Christopher Howse records. But more often than not Mr Howse himself alights, perhaps for an early merienda (afternoon snack). And his enchantingly atmospheric book records his account either of what tended then to ensue or of what then occurred to him, with the reader liable to be taken off on a revealing ramble far from the plaza mayor, for an account, say, of the paintings of J.W. Waterhouse prompted by the legend of St Eulalia martyred at Mérida, or of the inventor of the Luminous Magnetic and Prismatic Compass, Colonel Willoughby Verner, his house near Algeciras and his collection of birds’ eggs and stuffed v