Duncan Wheeler

In​ 2014 the movie Ocho apellidos vascos broke all records at the Spanish box office. Amaia, a young Basque woman, visits Seville for the first time. Rafa, a local Don Juan who has never left Andalusia, follows her back home, unaccustomed to a woman resisting his advances. A sequel, Ocho apellidos catalanes, appeared the next year, and is set in a small town outside Gerona (Amaia is now...

I knew​ very little about Víctor Barrio before, slightly hungover, I was asked by BBC World News on the morning of 10 July last year to comment on his televised death. It was the first time a matador had died in a professional Spanish bullfight since 1985. I’d spent a number of summers going to corridas when I was researching a book on the cultural politics of Spain’s...