What has a stout, fiddle-playing Irish man got to do with Britain’s cultural diplomacy in tense 1940s Spain? Everything. Find out about the ‘soft power weapon’ that was Walter Starkie, founder of the British Council in Madrid, and learn about that institution’s role at this crucial juncture in history. Naturally, there will also be talk of spies. Dr Marina Pérez de Arcos, of the University of Oxford and LSE, tells us about ‘Education, Intelligence and Cultural Diplomacy at the British Council in Madrid, 1940–1941’, her award-winning series of articles as published in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies.