An erudite and impassioned guide, Montalban finds a controversy in every building, a story in every street, illuminating the city’s rich history and turbulent politics, its art, gastronomy and football. There are many Barcelonas, and Montalban knows them all: the lavish art-nouveau houses in Vallvidrera where he himself lives; the labyrinthine squalor of the Barri Xino, setting for Genet’s Thief’s Journal; the Barri Gotic where the independent Catalan Kingdom between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries created a nationalist consciousness which has endured for half a millennium; the oneiric Parc Guell, designed by the city’s most celebrated architect, Antoni Gaudi.But this definitive survey is one unlikely to be endorsed by the Oficina de Turismo. For Montalban is fiercely critical of the values of the new ‘Olympic’ Barcelona: the misery of the inner-city slums where one person dies every second day from a heroin overdose; the speculation which has compounded overcrowding in a metropolis with the highest population density in Europe; the ravaging of working-class suburbs to make way for an aseptic international centre. Once Europe’s most utopian city, Barcelona, he argues, ‘has become a market, and everything is up for sale’.For visitors, Barcelonas will prove a stimulating, indispensable companion. And for everyone interested in art and architecture, politics and sport, it will provide an enthralling introduction to the great European city.

    

    It was the greatest and last struggle between traditional Catholicism and liberal secularism. To many, religion became the most divisive issue of the war, the single problem that distinguished one fraction from another.The Spanish Civil War as a Religious Tragedy is the first full-length comprehensive study of the religious dimension of the Spanish conflict. Drawing on memoirs, eye-witness accounts, the religious press of the period, and a thorough reading of secondary literature, Jos� M. S�nchez objectively examines the events, issues, attitudes, and effects of the war and corrects the mythology that has grown up around the topic.Especially vivid is S�nchez's account of the anticlerical fury in which nearly 7,000 clerics were killed, thousands of churches burned and destroyed, countless lay-persons assassinated, and the entire cultural ethic of Spanish Catholicism set upon an iconoclastic bloodletting worse than any other in the history of Christianity. The clergy's offering of pastoral and idealogical support to Franco's Nationalists as a response to the fury is also examined. S�nchez then focuses on the complexities of the Basques - an intensely Catholic people who made common cause with the anticlerical Republicans. He explores the Vatican's policy toward both sides, and analyzes the theological and moral controversy over the justice of the war as fought in the journals and the press, both in Spain and abroad. Finally, he investigates the controversies as they affected Catholics in France, England, and the United States, and concludes with an evaluation of the war's impact upon the religious consciousness of Spain, the Church, and the western world.