An image of seduction and success, wealth and fame, Julio Iglesias has achieved a global celebrity like no other Spaniard - with the exception of Dalí and Picasso - has achieved in our time. His career, however, has been riddled with contradictions: with more popular impact than approval from the cultural elites, Iglesias has been criticised for his artistic merits, his political alienations, his family origins, his financial dealings or his serial status as a Latin lover. A leading prose writer in the current Spanish panorama, 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 final conversion into a meme, without forgetting the centrality that his relationship with his father, his wives and his children has had in his life. In narrating the construction of the character, however, the book becomes a story of fifty years of Spanish social life and a parable of the evolution of our society from the late Franco era to the present day. In the wake of the profiles of Pla and Maurois, Chesterton or Emil Ludwig, The Spaniard Who Made the World Fall in Love is a book with the intensity of journalism and the pleasure that only literature can give.
