SOURCE: "Adrift in Iberia," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XLII, No. 15, October 5, 1995, pp. 35-6.

[In the following review, Gilmour finds The Stone Raft lacking in style and purpose.]

The Pyrenees have been more of a psychological barrier for mankind than a physical one. Although armies have long known how to go round them, ideas have seldom followed the drums. So often they seem to have been launched at the center, to have hit the mountain tops and then bounced back to the thrower; on occasion they have cleared the heights only to fall into ungrateful hands that have hurled them furiously back.

General Franco, for example, felt that he had nothing to learn from Europe—except, of course, for some military lessons from Germany. Everything he believed to be wrong with Spain—liberalism, socialism, freemasonry, and so on—was an unwelcome import from Europe. In the...