Thanks to the Alexandrian map-maker Ptolomy we know that a city called Barcino existed on the site of modern-day Barcelona in the Second Century BC. But where did the Romans get the name Barcino from? Did it come from an earlier 'Celto-Iberian' settlement? Or the Carthaginians perhaps? The following hypothesis about the origin of the word Barcino, from Historias y Leyendas de Barcelona by Joan de Deu Prats, is a fun one: 'On the shore of the River Rubricatus (now known as the

‘There are men who are born smeared in a patina of moral oil; misfortune slides off them like water. But those same men stain everything they touch.’ Victus is a dirty, foul-mouthed, bloody-nosed, big, heavy, long novel about a period in history no historian has ever succeeded in representing as interesting; the dreaded Spanish War of Succession. It’s a period where Europe goes to war in Spain, signs a load of pacts, betrays each other and decides to get out while it still ca

This week, a postmodern take on the hardboiled detective novel, the Planeta-award winning and internationally acclaimed Los Mares del Sur, by food-obsessed Catalan writer Manuel Vazquez Montalbán. ‘Three months without eating a rosco,’ begins the second chapter of the Barcelona-based detective novel The South Seas. ‘Not a whiff of a husband looking for his wife. No father looking for his son. No idiot trying to prove his wife’s adultery. What’s going on? Don’t women run away