SOURCE: Tonkin, Boyd. “Asylum for Modern Times.” New Statesman & Society 119, no. 3099 (31 August 1990): 37.

In the following review, Tonkin praises Tóibín's portrayal of Barcelona in Homage to Barcelona.

“Where ya going?” someone sings at an air stewardess in one of those tuneless dirges that fill Stephen Sondheim musicals. “Barcelona,” she drawls. And so, during the 1980s, did everyone. What Paris had once been and Prague may soon become, the Catalan capital was, and is: the “one living point of the earth” where, for fashion-conscious travellers, “modern times have found an asylum.”

So wrote Le Corbusier, praising the doomed Catalan republic of the early 1930s. As Colm Tóibín, twice a resident, explains in his travelogue-cum-cultural chronicle [Homage to Barcelona], the city has shone as a beacon of European progress three times inside a century. First, the vain but ruthless bourgeoisie of the years after the 1888 Great Exhibition...