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No matter how much you love music, going to a piano recital can be an uncomfortable experience. A sombre-faced pianist plays in an atmosphere of hushed reverence, perhaps swaying and grimacing to simulate profundity. If a sonata is performed, outbreaks of guilty coughing will occur throughout the audience between movements. It’s an unwritten rule that
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The first time my friend Rob and I experienced Pamplona’s San Fermin festival was in 2017. Held every year from 6-14 July in the northern Spanish city, it’s most famous for its bull runs, or encierros: at 8 a.m., on eight consecutive mornings, the six bulls destined for that evening’s bullfight, as well as six docile
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In one of my local bars, in the Andalucian town of Antequera, there’s a poster on the door advertising bullfighting classes for kids. Aged between about ten and fifteen, I see these students practicing every week in the bullring, taking turns to play the bull by pushing around a pair of wooden horns attached to
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Luis Rubiales, the former president of the Spanish football federation, is going to court for ‘The Kiss’. It was confirmed this week that Rubiales will stand trial in February 2025 for kissing Jenni Hermoso on the lips during the medal ceremony after Spain won the women’s football World Cup last August. Hermoso maintains the kiss was non-consensual.
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Spain’s Conservative Popular party (PP) came first in Sunday’s EU elections, upping its share of seats in the European parliament from 13 to 22 – with 34 per cent of the vote. The Socialists (PSOE), represented by energy minister Teresa Ribera, avoided the drubbing many had predicted, coming second with 20 seats. Between them, the PP
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Begona Gomez, the wife of Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, has received a court summons for 5 July, in connection with a corruption probe into her business activities. The summons follows the launch of a preliminary investigation into Gomez back in April, and relates to ‘the alleged offences of corruption in the private sector and influence
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Spain’s Socialist party (PSOE) won crucial elections in Catalonia over the weekend, beating a pro-independence bloc whose support has been declining steadily over the last few years. The Socialists were led by Salvador Illa, who served as Spain’s health minister during the pandemic. The party will now have the first shot at forming the region’s
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Pedro Sanchez has decided to stay on as Spain’s Socialist prime minister, despite announcing last week that he was considering resigning. Sanchez suspended his official duties for a few days to make the decision, following the launch of a judicial investigation into his wife, Begoña Gomez, for corruption and influence-peddling. (Sanchez has said the allegations are
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Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, wants to abolish the country’s ‘Golden Visa’ scheme, according to which non-EU citizens automatically receive residency for three years if they purchase property worth at least €500,000 (£429,000). Sanchez hopes that doing so will help tackle the cost-of-living crisis and soaring rental prices in the country’s biggest cities. It’s unlikely
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On 28 December 1993, after getting off a flight from Barcelona at Madrid’s Barajas airport, 23 year-old actress Maribel Verdu was suddenly surrounded by journalists and photographers. The reason for their frantic curiosity became apparent to Verdu when she was handed that day’s copy of a Spanish newspaper, in which a full-page feature claimed she
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Just four months into its second term, Spain’s Socialist-led government is already mired in corruption allegations. The latest scandal emerged this week and focuses on the wife of prime minister Pedro Sanchez, Begoña Gómez. Gomez is alleged to have had secret meetings with the management of Air Europa, Spain’s third largest airline, in late 2020, just
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Dozens of male Spanish soldiers have legally changed their gender, allegedly to claim benefits intended for women. In doing so, the soldiers have exposed the vacuity of Spain’s so-called ‘trans law’, passed last year by its Socialist-led government. Under Spain’s self-ID law, approved in February 2023 despite objections from the conservative opposition, feminist groups and elements of Spain’s ruling leftist coalition, anyone over the
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Spain has approved a pointless amendment to its constitution, replacing the word ‘handicapped’ with the phrase ‘persons with a disability’. Not only did Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who never says sorry for genuine oversights, apologise for the delay in making this happen, but he also announced that he regards himself as having thereby paid a ‘moral
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When I was a philosophy student at King’s College London in my early twenties, I came across a book called Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee. A history of western philosophy told through the story of the author’s relationship with it, it opens with a three- or four-year old Magee trying to catch himself
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Depending on how you look at the result of yesterday’s general election in Spain, either everyone won or no one won. It had been called five months early by outgoing Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who hoped to block a resurgent Spanish right after its emphatic victories in regional elections on 28 May. The vote
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Early on in his biography of the novelist Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader quotes a hilariously misanthropic letter Amis wrote to the poet Philip Larkin, one of his closest friends. Amis, at the time in his early thirties, was complaining about a three-month stint he and his family – including his son Martin, then five years
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A match-fixing scandal centred on Barcelona FC has spilled over into politics, showing that decades-old divisions die hard in Spain. Triggered by the so-called ‘Negreira Case’, which concerns payments of 6.7 million euros (about £5.9 million) allegedly made by Barca to a company linked to a Spanish refereeing official between 2001-18, Real Madrid and their
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Bullfighting is once again in the spotlight in Spain. This time, it’s the focus of a clash between the country’s Socialist-led government and the Fundación del Toro de Lidia (FTL), a non-profit organisation that defends and promotes the practice. The row kicked off last year because bullfighting – known as the ‘corrida de toros’, or ‘running of
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Last week’s Supreme Court ruling on Scottish independence will offer scant encouragement to separatists in Catalonia. The crux of the judgment – that Holyrood’s devolved powers do not stretch as far as being able to hold an independence referendum without consent from Westminster – also highlights the problem for Catalan secessionists, who have yet to
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Catalonia’s pro-independence government almost imploded last week. A major disagreement between its two governing parties occurred after one half of the coalition – hardline secessionist party Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) – proposed a no-confidence vote against president Pere Aragones for not pushing the secessionist cause hard enough. Aragones, a member of the more
