Backwards out of the Big World – A Voyage into Portugal –

“… Paul Hyland arrives by cargo boat, following Henry Fielding’s Voyage to Lisbon. Bloated with dropsy, the novelist went there to die, a year before the Lisbon earthquake shook the Age of Reason. Hyland ascends the Tagus from Lisbon’s Alcantara (Arabic, ‘the bridge’), through Portugal’s heartland and across Europe’s oldest intact frontier to Alcantara in Spain. He meets today’s writers, in the land of Camoes and Pessoa, and probes the nation’s psyche with fishwives, bullfighters, businessmen and gypsies. He talks with the pretender to the defunct throne, and encounters Portugal’s own once-and-future king, dom Sebastiao, supposed to have died in 1578, but still alive and well land waiting. …”