Our man in London: Maeztu and Spanish Anglophilia

Ramiro de Maeztu (Vitoria, 1874 - Madrid 1936) was an essayist, literary critic and Spanish political theorist, in addition to the first Spanish correspondent in the United Kingdom. During his long stay in London (1905-1919) he witnessed some of the key transformations in modern British society: the rise of the suffragette movement, the consolidation of the Labour Party, the beginnings of the modern welfare state, the First World War, etc. His newspaper articles became the conduit through which an eager Spanish audience learned of the travails of its more industrialized neighbour. Maeztu’s own ideas were strongly influenced by the great Edwardian authors he met in London, such as G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Yet his feelings towards his host country were complex and ambivalent, an attitude which continued after his return to Spain and which, in some ways, shaped his entire intellectual trajectory. He is therefore a fascinating case study of the dynamics of modern Spanish Anglophilia, and a good example of the intensely complicated relationship which Continental authors have had with the UK.

David Jiménez Torres is a university lecturer, newspaper columnist and author. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge and was Lecturer in Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. He is currently associate lecturer in Humanities at the Universidad Camilo José Cela. He has written extensively on Spanish-English cultural transfers, and is the author of Ramiro de Maeztu and England: Imaginaries, Realities and Repercussions of a Cultural Encounter (Tamesis, 2016).