William Collins A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain 1874-2018

I got this book for my husband because I thought he would be interested in reading it. He was, and found the book to be very well written too. We have lived here in Spain now for 2 1/2 years, 45 mins from Valencia in a small town (not expats). So it is interesting reading about their past history, although a lot doesn't change, which could be said about quite a few other countries!

Good history

Un corpus de informacion importante. Un historiador ha de ser ecuanime y no sectario y creo que no es el caso de Preston. Leido hasta el fin produce un claro complejo de haber nacido en el pais mas corrupto, egoista y necio. Caramba! ¿Donde estan los buenos y rectos españoles? ¿Hay algo bueno y decente que reseñar al menos para contrastar tanta perfiidia?.

An essential (and overdue) update on how and why Spain is what it is - warts and all. For a weighty library tome, it is remarkably readable - and Professor Sir Paul Preston is a fine historian

I mean your first warning is plenty of modern Spain doesn’t think of themselves as “a” but as Galicians, Basque, Catalan… But this dreary chronicle of corruption has no real insight into the experience of people living in Spain from 1870-2018. I read it to learn more about life under a kleptocratic dictatorship since that’s what the US just signed up for. And while this great man theory of historiography had nothing much to say about that, it is truly shocking how similar Franco’s clueless boasts sound like our next president and how his ministers’ sinister proclamations match the rhetoric of our next administration’s architects. As other reviewers have noted, the book’s relentless stockpiling of case after case and endless detail about every cabinet reshuffle winds up feeling more tiresome than tireless.