[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-BZIWSI5UQ&w=560&h=315] “Because there’s one thing I know I’d like to live / long enough to savour / That’s when they finally put you in the ground / I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.” – Elvis Costello...

    "regenerate v. 1 Bring or come into renewed existence; generate again. 2 Improve the moral condition of. 3 Impart new, more vigorous, and spiritually greater life to (a person or institution etc.). 4 Reform oneself." “Regeneration” is not the first word...

It’s not every day that I get sent to Barcelona to interview a controversial, divisive British public figure for the BBC. At the moment it’s happening every four months or so. In July, when the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Blair administration’s handling...

So he’s done it. Three hundred and thirteen days after an inconclusive general election, 125 days after its re-run and 58 days after a failed first attempt, Mariano Rajoy has formed a government, with the help of the Socialist Party. With the wobbliest minority...

What a difference five years can make. For Spain, 2011 seems like another era, when economic slump, rather than political or territorial crisis, worried its politicians and when Podemos was a mere glint in the eye of the indignados. But some things haven’t changed as...

  A friend of mine calls it the “New-York-Times-Thinks-We’re-Sh*t Syndrome”. As long as I can remember, certainly as long as I have been living in Spain, the country has been obsessed with what others think about it. When I first moved here I was struck by the...