LIVING

Fraser’s links with Spain stretch back to the Fifties when he first arrived in the country to write a novel after quitting his job as a reporter with Reuters. He has lived in Valencia since the mid-Eighties with his wife, Aurora Bosch, who is a professor of contemporary history. In 2006, his fourth—and most likely his last, he says—book about Spain, Napoleon’s Cursed War: Spanish Popular Resistance in the Peninsular War 1808-1814, was published to critical acclaim.

What’s your overall impression of Barcelona and its residents?

I have very fond memories of Barcelona; I lived in the city for five months in the Seventies whilst carrying out interviews for my book on the Civil War. I believe Barcelona has become much more cosmopolitan since hosting the Olympic Games in 1992. This might have been a process the Catalans were able to originate as they are more cosmopolitan in outlook than other people in the rest of Spain.

But they [Catalans] are also more parochial, more shut in on themselves. From my experience, living in Barcelona was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope: the people have a view of the centre (Madrid) that is conditioned by Catalan history. Saying that, I’ve always found Barcelona the place where I would best like to live, for two reasons: it’s cosmopolitan and has access to the sea. What more could you want from a Mediterranean city?

Are the current anarchists in Barcelona part of the anarchist tradition that was so prevalent during Spanish Civil War? 

Modern day anarchists in Barcelona are a different phenomenon to the anarchists of the Thirties. This latter movement was based on working-class ideology, which was concerned with taking over the means of production. The current anarchists have their roots in the Sixties' social revolution; consequently, they have a different sort of anarchist outlook, and are a reaction against many things in a modern capitalist society.