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Bullfighting season in Spain began earlier this week at Seville’s huge annual fair, known as the Feria de Abril. A couple of days before the fair began, at a corrida de toros (‘running of bulls’, translated into English as ‘bullfight’) in the Andalusian capital’s beautiful 18th-century bullring, one of the country’s best-known bullfighters (toreros) was badly gored in the rectum.
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A row has erupted in Spain over what to do with Pablo Picasso’s 1937 Cubist masterpiece ‘Guernica’. Since 1992, this gigantic black-and-white painting – which depicts the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937 by planes from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany – has hung in Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum. The Basque
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In the early years of the 20th century, a young philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) set himself the task of revitalising German Jewry – of bringing German Jews in from what he saw as the periphery of assimilation to the centre of a living faith. He thus became one of the pioneers of a Renaissance
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) once wrote: ‘[T]he man who feels himself drawn to philosophy must himself seek out its immortal teachers in the quiet sanctuary of their works.’ That’s easier said than done: philosophical classics have a terrible reputation outside ivory towers – as big, boring, difficult books, filled with obtuse theorising about irrelevant problems, their covers featuring ghastly old
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Almost a decade after Brexit, Gibraltar is entering a new era. As stipulated in a thousand-page treaty published on 26 February, which sets out the terms agreed by the UK and EU, Spanish guards will check the passports of travellers entering the Rock, as the British Overseas Territory (BOT) is known, and the 0.7-mile chain-link
Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is proposing a ban on under-16s using social media, following the example set by Australia last year. Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai earlier this week, Sánchez said: ‘Today our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone… We will protect [them]
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I’m backstage with classical crossover singer Karl Loxley and his pianist Tim Abel at Stratford-Upon-Avon’s Rother Street Arts House. The sound and lighting team are setting up in the empty theatre for what will be one of the final shows in Loxley’s ‘Songs of Christmas’ tour. Since 2015, when Loxley sung Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ on
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According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), people prefer reading books about great thinkers rather than by the thinkers themselves because ‘like is attracted to like and the shallow, tasteless gossip of a contemporary pinhead is more agreeable and convenient to them than the thoughts of great minds’. Thankfully, this contemptuous attitude towards biographers
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The USA’s Eric Lu has beaten more than 600 other pianists to win the 19th International Chopin Piano Competition. Held every five years in Warsaw around the anniversary of the Polish composer’s death on 17 October, this is one of several piano tournaments that often launch major careers, along with Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition, the Van
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Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, has demanded that the regions of Aragon, Asturias, the Balearic Islands and Madrid – most of which are governed by the Conservative People’s party (PP) – compile lists of doctors who refuse to perform pregnancy terminations. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP president of Madrid, has refused to publish what
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‘Today Spain shines as an example and as a source of pride. It’s [giving] an example to the international community by taking a step forward in defence of human rights.’ So said Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez on Sunday, in praise of the pro-Palestine mob that brought the Vuelta a España cycle race to
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Today, Pope Leo XIV will perform his first two canonisations, both of which were due to take place earlier this year but postponed after the death of Pope Francis. The recipients will be Pier Giorgio Frassati, an early twentieth century Catholic activist from Turin, and the 21st century’s first saint, Carlo Acutis – also known by
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If I were a doctor specialising in alternative treatments, and someone came to me feeling depressed, I wouldn’t send them off with a herb-based elixir or a bunch of St John’s Wort. I wouldn’t cleanse their chakras or refer them to an acupuncturist. I’d send them off to Málaga’s annual fair, which this year runs
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‘Spain is and will be forever the land of Christian people’. These are not, as you might think, the words of a marauding conquistador, but of a spokesperson for Spain’s right wing Vox party. They were posted on X this week, in response to a ban on Muslim religious celebrations in the southeastern town of
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At this time of year, I’m usually immersed in Pamplona’s San Fermin festival, which burst into life on Sunday and runs until next Monday. The fiesta is famous for its daily bull runs through the narrow streets of the old town – an anarchic, life-affirming tradition in which I have participated six times. Unable to
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Blaise Pascal resists definition. During a short life (he died in 1662, aged 39) he invented the calculator, laid the foundations for probability theory and created the first public transport system. He was also an austere Catholic, whose call for a return to strict Augustinian doctrines put him outside the religious mainstream. As a philosopher,
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Early yesterday afternoon, I walked home from my local supermarket empty-handed. In the Andalucian town of Antequera, the power and internet had just disappeared, card machines weren’t working and I had no cash. As I tried to remember what I had in the cupboards, I passed a woman on the street shouting up to someone
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A couple of weeks ago, at one of my local bars in Antequera, a waiter asked me something as he served our glasses of wine. I didn’t catch it, so I asked him to repeat what he’d said. After the third time, I still hadn’t understood and clearly wasn’t going to. This guy has a
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‘What sort of book might Satan write?’ ‘Why do people watch horror films?’ ‘Should we give up hope?’ These were three of the questions faced earlier this year by candidates seeking admission to All Souls College, Oxford, Britain’s most elite academic institution. Founded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, and King Henry VI in
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It’s a sunny October morning at a bull-breeding ranch north of Seville, and 82-year-old Frank Evans is preparing to step into the ring. Born in Salford, Evans is one of the few British men ever to become a professional bullfighter, or torero. There is something of the retired rock star about him. He is dressed
