In this year’s northern spring, I indulged myself in the pleasure of returning for a while to Spain, where I had squandered many marvellous months of my youth in the early 1960s. That was when Franco Spain had emerged from the traumas of the Civil War (1936–39), the isolation during the Second World War and its aftermath, and fifteen years of great penury. As I was studying Spanish at university, I had all the excuses I needed to run off regularly to a country that fascinated me. With hindsight, I know that I discovered Spain during a new, exhilarating beginning…