The Spaniard Who Captivated the World: A Life of Julio Iglesias— Ignacio Peyró

An icon of seduction and success, wealth and fame, Julio Iglesias has achieved global celebrity on a scale no other Spaniard—with the exception of Dalí and Picasso—has in our time. His career, however, has been fraught with contradictions: with more popular impact than approval from cultural elites, Iglesias has been criticized for his artistic merits, his political alignments, his financial dealings, and his status as a latin lover.

A reference prose writer in contemporary Spanish, Peyró approaches popular culture for the first time with a biographical portrait of Julio Iglesias, from his beginnings marked by illness to his consecration in Europe and America and his latest conversion into a meme. By narrating the construction of the character, the book also stands as a chronicle of fifty years of Spanish social life and a parable of the evolution of our society from late Francoism to the present day. In the wake of the lives of Pla and Maurois, of Chesterton or Evelyn Waugh, El español que enamoró al mundo (The Spaniard Who Enchanted the World) seeks to rediscover the art of the profile in a book with the intensity of journalism and the pleasure that only literature can provide.