Very interesting!

As a supporter of Scottish independence I’ve taken an interest in other similar movements.

The book was pretty thorough going into a lot of the recent history of Catalonia and Spain (taking us up until roughly a few months before their referendum in late 2017) with the author talking to a wide variety of people and making their stories and perspectives clear. I will say it felt like he didn’t talk about or to very many far left voices, just mentioning anarchists in passing and not expanding on either that history or present (although I will allow that that may be my bias and not his).

As I said I was coming at this from a Scottish perspective and Scotland comes up as a counter point occasionally, for the most part the author made fair observations but sometimes he got it very wrong (he says at one point Westminster didn’t really care if Scotland stayed or went, which from my point of view seems downright ignorant) I’m not sure if this speaks to the author’s inaccuracy or just that Scotland wasn’t his focus. but it was still interesting to hear an outside perspective.

It was very interesting to see the similarities and the differences between the movements and as I said above a lot of history is involved so it’s well worth a listen.

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Let down by poor reading

The reader is sometimes a bit too dramatic and theatrical.

I can just about live with that but his use of the Castilian pronunciation of Barcelona “Barthelona” is problematic and as the reading progresses becomes extremely irritating.

It is neither necessary nor appropriate when there is a commonly used and accepted English pronunciation. It’s like reading Paris as “Paree” when speaking English.

But more importantly, it’s not how it is pronounced in Catalan. So as well as coming across as pretentiously theatrical, it is also ill-informed and culturally insensitive.

There are other problematic points - including incorrectly pronounced names and even, at times, English words - but this is the most glaring issue and one which impacted my enjoyment very much.

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Good overview of recent Catalan history

A good quick run through of recent history let down by the narration. I'd put this down to the producer because Mr Oakes is clearly a talented voice actor. But the pronunciation is frequently "off" in Spanish, Catalan and even French. Accurate guidance to the narrator would have assisted greatly.

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