“A lively and entertaining book about Spain…Burns covers well subjects like bullfighting and flamenco,”
Tony Gould in The Spectator
“Jimmy Burns takes one on a literary tour of the most beautiful and interesting parts of Spain. The country’s diversity and richness of culture is described by a writer whose own love of Spain is so apparent. Mr Burns has chosen some of the most striking and delightful passages from Spanish and international literature and linked them with various aspects of Spansih life. This is useful reading for lovers of literature and of Spain.”
Army Quarterly
“The great advantange of Burns’ book is that he is thoroughly at home with Spanish writers and gives us enough of them to constitute a kind of interior commentary. Illusion and reality make an appearance. So does the great 19th century Richard Ford; ‘Spain is Spain…and in being Spanish consists its originality, its raciness, its novelty, its idiosyncracy’. You can’t tell it much straighter than that.”
Adam Hopkins in The Guardian
“Jimmy Burns does not just love Spain, he half belongs to it,”
J.D.F Jones in the Financial Times
“A wonderfully kaleidoscopic view of Spain, from the horrors recorded by Wellington’s officers during the Peninsular war to the absurdity of poor Lytton Strachey- who was a martyr to piles and therefore wretched on muleback- who told Virgina Woolf ‘Spain is Absolute Death.'”
Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Sunday Times
“Burns writes with colour and panache,”
Scotsman
“The John Murray Literary Companions series have thrown up very few duds and this latest is another winner. With chapters on Madrid, Seville, Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela as well as the country’s Roman, Moorish and Jewish heritage, this is an excellent introduction to Spain for anyone yet to visit the peninsula and a delightful reminder of its beauty and its contradictions for anyone who has not been there before.”
Guernsey Evening Press
