Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy

A powerful biography of Spain’s great king, Juan Carlos, by the pre-eminent writer on 20th-century Spanish history.There are two central mysteries in the life of Juan Carlos, one personal, the other political.The first is the apparent serenity with which he accepted that his father had surrendered him, to all intents and purposes, into the safekeeping of the Franco regime. In any normal family, this would have been considered a kind of cruelty or, at the very least, baleful negligence. But a royal family can never be normal, and the decision to send the young Juan Carlos away from Spain was governed by a certain ‘superior’ dynastic logic.The second mystery lies in how a p…