Word: barcelona
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...BARCELONA by Robert Hughes (Knopf; $27.50). The biography of a city of rebels and craftsmen, home of the first submarine and once the world capital of anarchism, as told in erudite prose and dazzling detail by TIME's veteran art critic...
Hardly surprising, then, that the savory city of rebels and craftsmen would appeal to Hughes, the longtime art critic for TIME and the epic chronicler of his native Australia (in the best-selling Fatal Shore). In Barcelona Hughes shows, in magisterial detail, how the brash province has always been as distinct from Spain as Catalan is from Spanish (derived as it is not from early Latin but from later). At the same time he notes, with affectionate irony, how Catalans have sometimes sung the praises of their unique tongue in Spanish. Some Catalans, he remarks, feel homesick even while...
...Barcelona, then, is not so much a travel book as a prodigiously researched biography of the city, taking in every nook and cranny of its involved history, from the 9th century confrontation of "Wilfred the Hairy" and "Charles the Bald" to the Postmodernist affectations of today's Catalan renaissance (the Olympic Village for this summer's Games, Hughes notes, was named after a Utopian socialist scheme of the last century that fizzled disastrously). In the Middle Ages, Catalan was probably more spoken around the Mediterranean than French, Italian or Spanish, and the Catalan empire had consulates in 126 places; later...
...ultimately, for its unpretentiousness, its vigor and its sense of style and language that Hughes loves Barcelona. For the same reasons, one suspects, Barcelona would love Hughes...
...BOOKS Barcelona is the biography of a yeasty, civilized city...