The author tries to convey his obsession with Spain, but only shows his obsession with himself. Codified narcissism. Have listened to two hundred+ books and this was the worst. I didn’t finish the other two terrible books on my list, but this was so bad I listened to all of it out of morbid curiosity to see if it would have redeeming value at all. It had some interesting points, but definitely not worth reading. The author spends the first 102 minutes! talking about himself and how he came to write the book: uninteresting self-aggrandizement. Then he, finally, launches into his analysis of the history of Spain. However, its just a rambling patchwork of apparently poorly researched conclusions. Wish I could see the footnotes. He seems obsessed with unnecessarily impressing the listener with his vocabulary, but many of the technical terms are subject to different interpretations, so the resulting book is confusing on almost every page. Wasted credit.