Dr Robert T. C. Goodwin was born and educated in London and was awarded his PhD by the University of London for his thesis on Golden Age Spain. His first major book, Crossing the Continent 1527-1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South, was published in 2008. He is currently a full-time writer and historian and is a Research Associate at University College. He divides his time between London and Seville.
This is history as it should be but so rarely is. Never, since Richard Cobb's great books on ancien regime France, has an English historian written on the history of a foreign country so much from the inside, with such intense love and flair and intimacy. The result is a gourmet's delight of a book: to be devoured greedily and digested at length and with pleasure David Starkey This is a vivid blend of grand narrative and colourful anecdote, written with pace, verve and a sharp sense of time and place. Dr Goodwin has dug deep in the archives, re-read the chronicles and come up with fresh insights that bring the politics and culture of early-modern Spain into a new alignment. A feast for both the general reader and the specialist B. W. Ife, Cervantes Professor of Spanish, King's College London, Emeritus