As I will have to go to the UK for a while in the next day or so, I probably won’t get round to writing my Spain v. Britain article for a while. But, quite coincidentally, I have today read the following comments in the preface to Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War. I could hardly agree more with these sentiments. And they will do for a start.

Spain, little understood and often privately disliked by patronising Northern peoples ….is frequently held to be a more violent nation that it is. Isolated by good fortune and by geography from the ‘world game’ of great power rivalry since 1815, it has more lessons to offer peoples than it has to learn: above all, it has grasped more successfully than other nations the art of combining progress with the persistence of tradition.

More anon.