Explore the lively cities of Madrid, Barcelona, and Sevilla, and follow the Route of the White Hill Towns in Andalucía's sun-drenched countryside. Experience the works of the great masters-from El Greco to Picasso to Dalí-and learn how to avoid the lines at the most popular museums. Self-guided walks lead you through the castles, cathedrals, and villages of this ancient but modern land. End your day with a glass of Rioja wine and a plate of tapas-then join the locals for an evening of flamenco.Rick's candid, humorous advice will guide you to good-value hotels and restaurants. He'll help you plan where to go and what to see, depending on the length of your trip. You'll get up-to-date recommendations about what is worth your time and money. More than just reviews and directions, a Rick Steves guidebook is a tour guide in your pocket.

    This history "from below" examines the burgeoning public sphere of working-class life and its relationship to the State, industrial bourgeoisie, and professional classes. Unemployment, rent strikes, and rising food prices are the backdrop to this laboratory of emergent urbanism. Chris Ealham is a lecturer at Saint Louis University in Madrid and co-editor of The Splintering of Spain.

    Reviewing this work, Octavio Paz wrote: “In these memories and landscapes, in these notes toward the history of his sensibility, there is great objectivity; the poet doesn’t set out to fantasize, or to lie to himself or anyone else. He attempts only to illuminate, with an almost impersonal light, something very personal: a few moments in his life. But is it truly ours, this life we live?”Luis Cernuda (1902–1963) was one of the leading poets of Spain’s Generation of 1927, which included Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Jorge Guillén.

    But this is no ordinary vacation—the Martins are visiting Mom’s old boyfriend. Mel’s worried that Mom might still have feelings for Antonio . . . until she meets Antonio’s son, Miguel, who’s almost exactly Mel’s age—and cute! So instead of spying on Mom for Dad, she ends up getting pretty distracted herself. . . .

    This book is a perfect introduction to Spain.'Everything Spain on the paperback edition, January 2005A rough guide to the history of Spain with maps and tourist tips, for those who want to be well informed but don’t want to take too long over it. More fun than the brief histories at the front of most popular guide books and much shorter than most standard histories, it can be read on the flight over. Spanish history unwinds across the pages in an easy-to-read narrative from the remote past and right up to the present day. There are cartoons, maps and eyewitness tips on where to go, and there's a simple timeline at the back and a list of rulers with their dates.

    Pick's book is the first to clarify the unity of purpose that drove Archbishop Rodrigo, a major figure not only as a historian and controversialist, but as a churchman whose military campaigns advanced the conquest of Muslim Spain and shifted the whole balance of power in the Iberian peninsula." ---J. N. Hillgarth, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto"By focusing on the diversified activities of the talented mid-thirteenth-century archbishop of Toledo, Lucy Pick brilliantly illuminates the complex relations between the Christian conquerors of Spain and the conquered Muslim and Jewish populations. Students of medieval Spain, of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, of medieval Muslims and Islam, and of medieval Jews and Judaism will benefit from this excellent study."---Robert Chazan, New York University.In Conflict and Coexistence, Lucy Pick sets out to explain how Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived alongside one another in medieval Spain. By examining the life and works of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the Archbishop of Toledo (1209-47), Pick explains that the perceived threat of the non-Christian presence was managed through the subordination of Muslims and Jews. Rodrigo stood at the center of a transformative period of history in the Iberian peninsula. During his long and varied career as archbishop, he acted as scholar, warrior, builder, and political leader. The wave of victories he helped initiate were instrumental in turning back the tide of Muslim attacks on Christian Spain and restarting the process of Christian territorial conquest. However, Toledo was still a multiethnic city in which Christians lived side by side with Jews and Muslims. As archbishop, he was faced with the considerable challenge of maintaining peace and prosperity in a city where religious passions and intolerance were a constant threat to stability.This work seeks to examine Rodrigo's relations with the Muslims and Jews of his community both as he idealized them on paper and as he worked through them in real life. Though Rodrigo wrote an anti-Jewish polemic, and set out to conquer Muslim-held lands, he also used scholarly patronage and literary creation to combat internal and external, Christian and non-Christian threats alike. His intended and actual consequences of these varied techniques were to allow Christians, Muslims, and Jews to live together under Christian authority. Rodrigo was bound by practical necessity to find a means of accommodating these groups that was both effective and theologically satisfactory. Throughout this influential work, Pick examines the various aspects of Rodrigo's life and career that led to his policies and the consequences that his work and beliefs brought about in medieval Spain. This book will be of interest to anyone who studies the history, religion, and literature of medieval Spain, to those interested in the transmission of learning from the Muslim to the Christian world, and to those who study intellectual life and development in medieval Europe.

    Today it stands as a legacy to its founder and creator, Duncan Phillips. Art Beyond Isms was published to accompany a major travelling exhibition and features over 60 of the most important European works from the Collection.Phillips primarily collected work by French and American artists, and the collection's holdings include work by leading impressionist, post-impressionist, abstract and abstract expressionist artists, as well as works by earlier artists. The focus of the book is mainly 19th and 20th century French paintings, including Renoir's The Luncheon of the Boating Party, as well as five important paintings by C�zanne and Monet.Among the non-French artists, van Gogh, Picasso, Kokoscha, Klee and Modigliani are represented and important proto-modern works by such artists as Constable, El Greco and Goya are also included. The beautifully represented works are shown individually and in groups accompanied by engaging narrative entries.

    

    Emphasizing themes of longevity, continuity, and transmission in the Islamic decorative arts and sciences of medieval Spain, the book includes works dating from the time of the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century to the final phase of Muslim life in Spain in the sixteenth century. Objects from tenth-century Cordoba illustrate the creation of a unique court aesthetic under the calipate that was widely copied by both Muslim and Christian rulers in the following centuries. that resulted from the Christian conquests in the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries of the cities of Andalusia. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Muslim craftsmen working both in the kingdom of Granada and for Christian patrons (the crown, nobility, and the Church) in Seville, Toledo, Cordoba, and Valencia produced some of the most beautiful and evocative ceramics and textiles of the time, items that were exported throughout Europe and served as models for silk and ceramic industries in regions including the Italian peninsula. Works of particular note include a tenth-century ivory pyxis from Cordoba, an early fifteenth-century amorial carpet from Murcia made for the queen of Argon, and two exquisite, illuminated Hebrew Bibles.

    Its history reads like a history of pleasure itself. It is also a story of invasions and migrations, of artists and conmen, of drop-outs and love-ins. The Carthaginians established a cult to their goddess of sex there, and named the island after Bez, their god of dance. Roman centurions in need of a bit of down time between campaigns would go to Ibiza to get their kicks. And over the centuries, cultures around the Med have used the island either as a playground or a dump for the kind of people who didn't quite fit in back home, but who you'd probably quite like to meet at a party...This is the history of Ibiza, the fantasy island, framed by one long, golden summer where anything can happen - and it usually does.

    S. Pritchett was described by Eudora Welty as “one of the great pleasure-givers in our language.” Here is a true literary event: the first major biography of this extraordinary writer, who for most of a century ennobled the ordinary, and the affecting story of the two tumultuous marriages that fueled his art.He would become universally known as V.S.P., but he began life as Victor–named for Queen Victoria–in 1900. His imagination was both an inheritance from and an inoculation against his unpredictable father: a charming spendthrift who went bankrupt in a variety of businesses. For Victor, writing ultimately became a way to turn the pain of his past into security.As a reporter in the 1920s, Pritchett was posted to some of the trouble spots of Europe, including pre-Civil War Spain, but he preferred travel to politics, honing the acute perception of common people that he used to great effect in his fiction. His youthful marriage to a better-born aspiring actress was his first crisis, leaving him in sexual misery, comforted only by the “inner riot” of his imagination.His affair with and marriage to Dorothy Roberts, in his mid-thirties, changed his life. Passionate and forceful, she became Pritchett’s support and secretary, helping him to develop his voice in short stories, novels, literary journalism, and memoirs. His work dramatized the world of his native lower middle class, showing how “every life is interesting.” Their union produced two children and a cache of stunning erotic letters, published in part here for the first time. But as Pritchett’s international fame as an author and critic grew, so did the couple’s separations. Already a serious drinker, Dorothy became an alcoholic. Pritchett took an American mistress while in residence at Princeton, causing a painful and prolonged domestic crisis.Illuminating the connections between events in his life and famous works such as his novel Mr. Beluncle, dramatizing the friendships Pritchett forged with other writers, particularly Gerald Brenan, and cogently analyzing the undeserved eclipse his reputation would suffer immediately after his death, Jeremy Treglown’s V. S. Pritchett is the complete story of a popular, influential, deceptively simple author, a man to whom, he once misleadingly claimed, “nothing continues to happen.”

    Brian Catlos uncovers a social dynamic in which sectarian differences comprise only one of the many factors in the causal complex of political, economic and cultural reactions. Beginning with the final stage of independent Muslim rule in the Ebro valley region, he traces the subtle and often surprising transformation of Islamic society into mud�jar society under Christian domination.

    Entranced by their flamenco music, their philosophy of revenge, and the concrete ability to deliver political results, the young woman joins a movement destined to annihilation and becomes its sole survivor, burdened with the task of keeping its memory and project for a better world alive through conversations with their flamenco shadows.Transcending political viewpoints, Mr. Siciliano opens a new chapter in the understanding of the Spanish Civil War, opting for a literary interpretation that looks beyond right and wrong to more universal lessons only the passage of decades and the healing effects of time can reveal.

    The question of identity was to play a central role in the lives of these and later converts whether of Spanish or Portuguese heritage, for they could not return to Judaism as long as they remained on the Peninsula, and their place in the Christian world would never be secure. This book considers the history of the Iberian conversos-both those who remained in Spain and Portugal and those who emigrated. Wherever they resided the question of identity was inescapable. The exile who chose France or England, where Jews could not legally reside, was faced with different considerations and options than the converso who chose Holland, a newly formed Protestant country where Jews had not previously resided. Choosing Italy entailed a completely different set of options and dilemmas. Ren�e Levine Melammed compares and contrasts the lives of the New Christians of the Iberian Peninsula with those of these countries and the development of their identity and sense of ethnic solidarity with those of the Nation. Exploring the knotty problem of identity she examines a great variety of individual choices and behaviors. Some conversos tried to be sincere Catholics and were not allowed to do so. Others tried but failed either theologically or culturally. While many eventually opted to form Jewish communities outside the Peninsula, others were unable to make a total commitment to Judaism and became cultural commuters who could and did move back and forth between two worlds whereas others had fuzzy or attenuated Jewish identities. In addition, the encounter with modernity by the descendants of conversos is examined in three communities, Majorca, Belmonte (Portugal) and the Southwestern United States, revealing that even today the question of identity is still a pressing issue. Offering the only broad historical survey of this fascinating and complex group of migrants, this book will appeal to a wide range of academic and general readers.

    Whether you prefer to wander through Phoenician and Roman ruins, explore Moorish castles, or be enriched by Spanish culture and museums, this travel guide has it all. Forty Day Trips from Rota provides practical travel advice from a local's perspective including:Easy to understand travel directionsSightseeing to-do listsDining recommendationsHelpful hintsExplore the many possibilities of Andalusia, all within a day's adventure from Rota.

    Son of Philip the Handsome and Juana, Queen of Castile, who was regarded as insane, by the age of nineteen he was the most powerful monarch in Europe. In this, the first biography for many years, Harald Kleinschmidt draws on the latest research to portray Charles V in the light of his upbringing and dynastic relations, and against a background of turmoil and unprecedented European expansion. Coming to power as a very young man, Charles V held high aims and ideals about exercising control over the greatest number of territories ever accumulated by a European ruler. As the defender of Catholic Christendom, he attempted to achieve both the cultural and religious unity of Europe and European world rule. His struggles against Lutheranism were initially successful, but the harsh measures he took against his Protestant prisoners provoked an uprising that forced him to grant Protestantism legal recognition. Likewise, although Charles V substantially extended Spanish dominions in the New World through the conquest of Mexico by Cortes in 1519-21 and of Peru by Pizarro ten years later, the demands of ruling his vast European realm ultimately overwhelmed him. Disillusioned by the seeming impossibility of achieving peace in Europe, in 1555 Charles renounced his imperial crown in favour of his brother Ferdinand. Shortly afterwards, he resigned his kingdoms of Spain, the Netherlands and the Spanish Americas to his son Philip and retired to live in seclusion near the monastery of San Geronimo de Yuste. Legend has it that his ghost continues to advise the Spanish monarchs.

    In taking an explicitly text-centered approach, the books in this series offer a unique way of considering the particular concerns, styles and modes of representation of numerous national cinemas around the world. This volume focuses on the vibrant practices that make up Latin American cinema, a historically important regional cinema and one that is increasingly returning to popular and academic appreciation. Through 24 individual concise and insightful essays that each consider one significant film or documentary, the editors of this volume have compiled a unique introduction to the cinematic output of countries as diverse as Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, Chile and Venezuala. The work of directors such as Luis Bunuel, Thomas Guiterrez Alea, Walter Salles, and Alfonso Arau is discussed and the collection includes in-depth studies of seminal works as such Los Olvidados, The Hour of the Furnaces, Like Water For Chocolate, Foreign Land, and Amoros Perros.