Madrid
‘A selfish, ignoble person’ – the dark side of the Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa
‘Why so many lies, so many deceptions, so much disloyalty?’ lamented his first wife, echoing the views of many others once close to the Peruvian novelist
Growing up with thieves, murderers and heroin addicts
Aged ten, Jonathan Tepper was manning phones and scheduling deliveries at his parents’ drug rehabilitation centre in San Blas, Madrid – ‘a rescue shop within a yard of hell’
The fragility of the modern city reflects humanity’s vulnerability
The more complex the infrastructure, the more liable it is to break down – as was recently apparent in the blackout that brought Madrid and Lisbon to a standstill in April
From light into darkness
The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was…
Secrets and lies: Berta Isla, by Javier Marías, reviewed
A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most…
One of history’s saddest chapters
One afternoon in the early 1990s, an elderly gentleman from Alicante told me of the tragedy that had occurred at…
Vile deeds and voyeurism
The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is —…
Portrait of the week
Home Alan Henning, 47, a British volunteer aid worker taken captive in Syria by Islamic State, was murdered, and footage…
Barflies and buccaneers
In February 1924 the Hotel Florida, a ten- storey marble-clad building with 200 rooms, a glass-roofed atrium and red plush…
