British/Irish – he had double citizenship – author and former teacher, born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He was christened Henry Patterson but was called, even by himself, Harry. He is, however, best known under the pseudonym Jack Higgins. When he was still a baby, his father left the family and his mother moved with her son to her own father in Belfast, where the boy attended Nettlefield Primary Sch...

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Spanish author, journalist, essayist and poet. Vázquez Montalbán was born in Barcelona the same year as General Franco came out of the civil war victorious. He belonged to that generation of Spaniards who did not get to know what it means to live in a democracy until their middle ages. Until his death in 1975, Franco ran a hard dictatorship with censorship and with capital punishment or i...

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