To mark Wanderlust ’s ‘Year of Culture’, our new series on the arts, crafts and traditions inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list begins by looking at why the ‘Portuguese blues’ still offers a direct line to Portugal’s soul

Enrique Vila-Matas Montevideo Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott 240pp. Yale University Press. £14.99 (US $27). “Words are poor mountaineers and poor miners”, lamented the young Franz Kaf

Twenty six years ago, Italian writer and gardener Umberto Pasti fell asleep beneath a remote fig tree on a stony hillside facing the Atlantic Ocean, 40 miles south of Tangier. When he awoke, he knew t

Gonçalo M. Tavares O Fim dos Estados Unidos de América Epopeia 912pp. Relógio d’Água. €28. In an essay written in 1949, Jorge Luis Borges declared that the allegory was “an aesthetic error”. He confes

Julián Casanova Franco 528pp. Crítica. €22.90. Giles Tremlett El Generalísimo Franco: Power, violence and the quest for greatness 528pp. Bloomsbury. £30. Juan Carlos I, with Laurence Debray Reconcilia

The sudden burst of gunshots shattered the relative calm of Lisbon’s Praça do Comércio, a beautiful plaza facing the Portuguese city’s harbour. King Carlos I, slumped in his open carriage, barely had