Spain’s leftist unicorn

It has been a strange spectacle watching the optimism generated by Pedro Sánchez’s general election victory at the end of April turn sour. The stop-start slow-mo negotiations between the Socialist Party and Unidas Podemos to form a new government never really seemed...

The brother-in-law (part two)

Last October, I joined a group of foreign journalists for an off-the-record meeting with Ciudadanos party leader Albert Rivera. We’d had plenty of these kinds of events with leading politicians before, and several with him, but on this occasion he seemed different to...

Jack Sparrow versus Spain

One of the top headlines on El País’s website earlier this week read: “The Spanish black legend spread by Hollywood”. The article beneath reported how the Defence Ministry has given an award to historian Esteban Vicente Boisseau for a book he has published on how...

Mainland dreams

Moroccan teenagers in Ceuta’s port area. Photo: Guy Hedgecoe The desperation of migrants attempting to reach their dreamed-of destination has become a familiar sight on our TV and computer screens, its impact inevitably diluted by the 24-hours cycle. But on a...

The Editor

In the spring of 2015, El Mundo’s Asia correspondent David Jiménez was unveiled as the newspaper’s new editor. A year and 366 editions of the paper later, he was sacked. Jiménez recounts his eventful tenure in a newly published book, El Director (“The Editor”). Having...