A People Betrayed
PAUL PRESTON
(William Collins, 768 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The epithet “Spain is different” has a long history. It pre-dates the tourism campaign launched in the early 1960s, when the Franco regime revived the cultural stereotypes that so attracted the hardy and curious, if somewhat romantic, foreign ­travellers of the early nineteenth century: medieval castles, castanets, bullfights. It was used by Napoleon when he suffered his first battlefield defeat on the 19 July 1808 at the hands of the Spanish near Bailén, Andalucia, during the Peninsular War – or the War of Independence, as Spaniards called it.

The role played by Spaniards in supporting the Duke of Wellington had a positive impact on British attitudes towards Spain, for a while replacing the anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish ­historiographical tendency of the Black Legend with a more sympathetic Hispanophilia.

Had the quixotic heroism and resilience of the Spanish prevailed as part of an agreed national narrative, then the story of modern Spain would have turned out rather differently from that told by Professor Preston. Nevertheless, the impressive research marshalled by the leading British historian of contemporary Spain makes for a compulsive, if disturbing, read. It provides a penetrating account of a country that has struggled to evolve into an accountable democratic European state while remaining prone to “corruption, political incompetence and social division”.