Overview

Most of these stories were written more than ten years ago now, such as The Bite, which depicts the solitary fight of man for human dignity and his inalienable love of freedom. But the bite in that story is also, for this writer, a more specific attack against the culture of a people and against the freedom of the individual within it. At the time of writing, in November 2017, the bite from a fierce Madrid is felt once again in the flesh of Catalonia, as is the bite of the European Union which is refusing to come to its defence. The Catalan Parliament is dissolved, many of its Generalitat are in jail, (not least among these two senior cultural figures, who are noted pacifists) its leader currently in uneasy exile in Belgium, pending his own imprisonment. These circumstances alone are sufficient to show the reader how close threats to human freedom may lie, and how literature can make us more aware of this.