'Ideal for the cultured tourist . . . a vivid portrait' Times Literary Supplement
The charm of Madrid is elusive, but for those who know how to find it, the city has magic. Its magic can be found in the shadow cast over the present by the past. In this traveller's reader, a city that was once the seat of power for perhaps the most ambitious political enterprise the Western world had seen since the fall of Rome, the Spanish Empire, is brought to life with the help of rich and revealing eyewitness accounts from many different sources.
The Earl of Clarendon describes seventeenth-century bullfights; Salvador Dali plays a surrealist joke on a snooty barman at the Ritz; Rubens visits the Alcázar; Manet is at the Prado; generals and anarchists meet in the Puerta del Sol.
Hugh Thomas has chosen these and other eyewitness accounts from five hundred years of the Spanish capital's history, drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs and novels, to evoke for today's visitor and armchair travellers alike the dramatic events and personalities of the city's past.

Hugh Thomas was an English historian, writer and life peer in The House of Lords. Best known for The Spanish Civil War (1961), for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award, Thomas wrote a number of political works and histories. By the end of his life, Thomas had been appointed Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and received the Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic from Spain as well as the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle.