Where once under-achieving Spanish players were more virility and machismo than style and substance, now they go in search of a hat-trick of major tournament titles.

THE other evening, venturing forth after the deluges, I walked out of a meadow into the half-darkness of an old beech wood.

A Spanish judge opened a criminal investigation into the country’s civil war atrocities today, the first official inquiry into one of the darkest chapters of its history.