Marcel Leprin (1891-1933) was born in Cannes and brought up in Marseilles. After the First World War, he went to Paris where he wandered for a few days around Montmartre. Penniless and in a state of despair, the locksmith Achille Depoilly found him seated on a bench in the place du Tertre, half-starved and numb with cold.

The locksmith told him to come with him to the bistro Mère Catherine, where he was going with his wife and friends. A bowl of hot soup, a plate of boiled beef and a bottle of red wine (what else?) revived the unknown man from the South. Leprin told them, “I am a painter. Having heard of Montmartre from my friend, the sculptor André Verdilhan, whose brother, Mathieu, also a painter, used to live here, I wanted to work in the same place, but bad luck laid me low. I have absolutely nothing.”

The painter André Utter (1886-1948) was dining there that night. He heard the stranger’s story and immediately passed a hat round to collect some money. Utter found a hotel for Leprin and the next day brought him canvas and paints. The poet Jean Vertex, who was also present that evening, described the scene: “At the next table, a dozen artists seated around Utter heard the conversation. It was like the twelve apostles gathered together at the temple of Mère Catherine.”

In a building that previously served as the church presbytery of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, the Mère Catherine restaurant on Montmartre’s Place du Tertre was established in 1793. It is one of the city’s most historic eating places. During the French Revolution, Georges Danton met his supporters there, where he is supposed to have written the words “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die” (a conflation of two biblical sayings from Ecclesiastes). A plaque at the entrance also recounts that the word “bistro” was coined here when, on 30 March 1814, a group of Russian soldiers asked for drinks “bystro” (the Russian for “quickly”).

Marcel Leprin was an orphan brought up by the Don Bosco Salesian monks, who noticed his gift for drawing and lithography. Leprin fancied taking up bullfighting in Barcelona, but was called up to serve in the First World War, which he somehow survived. After moving to Montmartre, he lived by selling paintings and pastel drawings to tourists. In 1924 he signed an exclusive contract with Henri Bureau, a picture-framer living in Montmartre, who promoted his works. In 1926 Leprin travelled across France, painting numerous landscapes and village views.

Despite considerable success at two exhibitions at the Druet gallery in 1928 and 1931, Leprin remained a solitary and depressive individual. He sought refuge in drink and drugs and died prematurely in 1933. He left some 700 paintings reflecting his different moods and styles. The Marseilles period is largely made up of large decorative paintings; the Montmartre period is quite dark and commercial; and the period of his travels – reminiscent of Sisley and Pissarro – more warm and creative.

Today, Leprin’s paintings can be found at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée Carnavalet, and the Musée de Montmartre – all in Paris – and in Switzerland at the Petit Palais de Genève. Well worth seeking out.

The medieval city of Königsberg lay on the south side of the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Poland. It was the capital of Prussia from the late Middle Ages until 1701 and the regional capital of the province of East Prussia until 1945. After its destruction it was renamed Kaliningrad.

Königsberg was the birthplace of the mathematician Christian Goldbach (who conjectured that every even number greater than 4 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers e.g. 20 = 13 + 7) and the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. It was also the birthplace and home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), appointed to a chair in metaphysics at the University of Königsberg in 1770. While working there he published his Critique of Pure Reason and his Metaphysics of Morals. On his memorial in the city are the famous words: “Der bestirnte Himmel über mir, das moralische Gesetz in mir” (The starry heavens above me, the moral law within me).

Königsberg was a city of impressive merchant houses, churches, banks, theatres and museums beyond whose defensive walls lay residential suburbs with broad boulevards and large villas. These were the homes of prosperous middle-class citizens, while the country mansions and huge estates of the East Prussian landed gentry – the Junker – dominated the surrounding countryside. Isabel Denny writes:

“The winters were cold and the River Pregel often remained ice-bound well into March. Christmas was therefore a welcome respite and the first Christmas trees of the year appeared in early December in the Münzplatz, in front of the University and in the Kaiser Wilhelm Platz … The two biggest marzipan makers in Königsberg, Schwermer and Gelhaar, tempted shoppers with their beautifully wrapped marzipan sweets in the form of fruit, flowers and vegetables. There was a speciality called Randmarzipan packed in heart-shaped boxes and marzipan models of the castle decorated with candied fruit. Christmas trees were on sale and young boys would offer to carry them home for five or ten Pfennigs.”

Marzipan is made of ground almonds and sugar or honey. Traditionally it is used for sweets such as marzipan-filled chocolates and miniature imitations of fruits and vegetables. It is also rolled into thin sheets to cover wedding and Christmas cakes before they are iced. In some countries, marzipan is shaped into small figures of animals as a treat for New Year’s Day.

Believed to have originated in Persia (present-day Iran) and to have been introduced to Europe by the Turks, marzipan became a specialty of the Baltic Sea region of Germany, in particular the cities of Lübeck and Königsberg. In Germany the term Königsberger Marzipan still refers to a special type of marzipan that is fired on the surface, so it is caramelized. It also tastes less sweet, using powdered rather than granulated sugar and a few drops of rose water.

In March 1945 Königsberg was reduced to a heap of rubble and in July 1946 the city and the northern part of East Prussia (an area about half the size of Belgium) officially became part of the Soviet Union. Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad, after one of Stalin’s cronies. Today, hardly a trace of the old city remains, although as Norman Davies reminds us: “All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a reminder, an irreducible residue.”

This tragic history can be found in Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (2011) by Norman Davies and The Fall of Hitler’s Fortress City: The Battle for Königsberg, 1945 (2009) by Isabel Denny. There is also this web site.

Yet the marzipan survived. The old manufacturers set up shop in Germany where, today, Ewald Liedtke and Werner Gehlhaar (among others) continue the tradition founded in forgotten Königsberg.

The tarantula has been named Poecilotheria rajaei, of the genus Poecilotheria, from the Greek poikilos meaning spotted and therion meaning wild beast. Officially described in a 2012 publication of the British Tarantula Society, it was discovered three years earlier by a villager who brought the body of a dead tarantula to the Sri Lankan Biodiversity Education and Research organization.

The size of a human face with legs spanning up to 8 inches (20 centimetres), the spider has vivid yellow and gray piping on the first and fourth legs with a pink abdominal band. It prefers living in old-growth trees, but due to deforestation in its war-torn habitat it has taken to old buildings. Its venom is not lethal to humans, but it can kill small rodents, birds, lizards and snakes.

One of the best known film scenes involving a tarantula comes from the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962) starring Sean Connery. The film is based on the 1958 novel of the same name by Ian Fleming (in which the tarantula is actually a poisonous centipede). The scene plays on the fearsome reputation of the tarantula, whose bite is apparently no more deadly than a bee sting. It was never the spider’s intention to harm Bond, who was obviously too big to eat. The creature’s tiny mind was on how to get back to its burrow.

Tarantula venom subdues small prey – mainly insects – and it takes considerable effort to get a tarantula to bite a human being. We know this because Dr. William J. Baerg, Professor of Entomology at the University of Arkansas in the 1940s, spent a lot of time persuading tarantulas to bite him. The first attack was unbidden and occurred when he tried to position a Trinidadian tarantula (“extremely pugnacious in attitude,” he wrote) to bite a white rat. The spider went for his finger instead. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, Baerg learned that the sting, although irritating, was basically harmless.

More deliberate attempts followed involving 26 less pugnacious species of tarantula. Baerg had to prod them repeatedly to get them to bite. For comparison’s sake, he also allowed himself to be bitten by the smaller and less scary-looking black widow spider – and got very sick. Baerg retired from teaching in 1951 and published his classic book The Tarantula in 1958. Somehow the screenwriters for Dr. No, at work a few years later, missed this crucial evidence.

Mark Twain is often spuriously quoted, but he did write about tarantulas. Roughing It (1872) follows the travels of the young Samuel Clemens through the Wild West during 1861-67. In Chapter XXI he reached Carson City in Nevada Territory where surveyors are mapping the land for a prospective railroad. They catch and bring back tarantulas: “Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish.”

In the middle of the night, the shelf on which the jars of tarantulas were being kept is knocked down. Only Mark Twain could describe the chaos that ensued. When a lantern is finally produced, fourteen scant-clad men are discovered roosting gingerly on trunks and beds “too earnestly distressed and too genuinely miserable to see any fun about it.”

The chapter ends, “Not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. There were ten or twelve of them. We took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success. Did we go back to bed then? We did nothing of the kind. Money could not have persuaded us to do it. We sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy.”

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) had the makings of a Mark Twain. He had an eye for character and an ear for acerbity, returning from his trip “as promiscuously qualified”, in the words of Henry James, “as variously quickened, as his best friends could wish for fine production and fine illustration in some order still awaiting sharp definition.” That promise was never to be fulfilled, but more than an inkling can be discerned in his Letters from America (1916), which abound in impressionistic descriptions of landscape and, especially, water.

Travelling by river from Montreal to Toronto, he enters Lake Ontario, which he finds ominous and unnatural, as if it had a perceptibly wicked soul:

“The lake was a terrible dead-silver colour, the gleam of its surface shot with flecks of blue and a vapour enamel-green. It was like a gigantic silver shield. Its glint was inexplicably sinister and dead, like the glint on glasses worn by a blind man… Our boat appeared to leave no wake; those strange waters closed up foamlessly behind her. But our black smoke hung, away back on the trail, in a thick, clearly-bounded cloud, becalmed in the hot, windless air, very close over the water, like an evil soul after death that cannot win dissolution… The lake around us was dull, though the sun shone full on it. It gleamed, but without radiance.”

Brooke visited Niagara Falls, where he described how the human race is apt to destroy what it most admires by surrounding it with “every distraction, incongruity and vulgarity”. There follows a one hundred and seven word sentence about “touts insinuating and touts raucous” that rivals Mark Twain at his very best. Little has changed. From Niagara to Winnipeg, Regina, and the Rockies, and again it is water that catches his eye in the form of Lake Louise:

“Imagine a little round lake 6000 feet up, a mile across, closed in by great cliffs of brown rock, round the shoulders of which are thrown mantles of close dark pine. At one end the lake is fed by a vast glacier, and its milky tumbling stream; and the glacier climbs to snowfields of one of the highest and loveliest peaks in the Rockies, which keeps perpetual guard over the scene… In the lake, ever-changing, is Beauty herself, as nearly visible to mortal eyes as she may ever be. The water, beyond the flowers, is green, always a different green. Sometimes it is tranquil, glassy, shot with blue, of a peacock tint. Then a little wind awakes in the distance, and ruffles the surface, yard by yard, covering it with a myriad tiny wrinkles, till half the lake is milky emerald, while the rest still sleeps.”

Seated in a café in Berlin one year earlier, Brooke sketched his poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”. It reveals the same qualities of observation and perception, ending in a nostalgic cri de coeur that every English schoolchild used to know:

“Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? … oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?”

In 1784 the Mur des Fermiers Généraux (tax-collectors’ wall) was built around Paris, separating the upper reaches of Montmartre from its lower slopes. Areas outside the barrière or customs post were immediately populated by dance-halls, drinking establishments and places of popular entertainment and Montmartre gained a reputation for pleasure and, of course, crime.

In 1809 a family called Debray acquired two mills on Montmartre for grinding flour: the Blute-fin (from the verb bluter, which means to bolt or to sieve flour ) and the Radet (built in 1717). It was the former that became the Moulin de la Galette, whose name comes from a small bread roll that the Debray millers made and sold with a glass of milk. In 1814 the miller was killed during the Battle of Paris, when Prussian and Russian forces were attacking Napoleon. In 1833, the miller’s son saw greater profit in turning the mill into a guingette (dance-hall) and it became an overnight success. In 1924, to save it from destruction, the Moulin de la Galette was moved from its original site to where it stands today.

In a letter dated 1876 the French writer Émile Zola said, “We rushed off into the countryside to celebrate the joy of not having to listen to any more talk about politics.” He meant to Montmartre, which was still a village with orchards, shops and its two windmills. From the centre of Paris it was just an hour’s walk or could be reached by train. Zola lived the last 13 years of his life on the lower slopes of Montmartre and in 1902 was buried in the nearby Cimetière de Montmartre, where a magnificent tombstone still stands. But five years later his remains were relocated to the Panthéon, where he shares a crypt with Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.

It was also in 1876 that the French artist Renoir painted “Le Bal du moulin de la Galette” (Dance at Le moulin de la Galette). It depicts a typical Sunday afternoon at the Moulin frequented by working class Parisians who would dress up and spend time dancing, drinking, and eating galettes. Since then the windmill has acted as a lure for every artist and photographer (notable or otherwise) – Van Gogh, Utrillo, Atget, Leprin – who has wandered its lanes.

A recent issue of TimeOut Paris had this to say: “In past times Montmartre abounded in windmills and one of the few remaining today shelters a chic, modern restaurant. It is difficult to imagine a more picturesque corner of Montmartre – several tables are set out in the paved courtyard – and the dishes bear witness to real effort: just taste the pan-fried foie gras with lemon grass and juniper berries and its melt-in-the-mouth beetroot or the juicy suckling pig and its apple puree. Desserts like figs caramelised in muscovado sugar are genuinely artistic compositions. If you only have a small budget, stick to the daily menu (more reasonably priced than à la carte) and be prudent choosing the wine.”

In his chanson “Le coeur de Paris” (1952) the French singer and songwriter Charles Trenet recalled Montmartre’s urchins (poulbots) with archangels’s faces and Montmartre itself asleep in a canvas by Utrillo”, but at its heart is the street:

Le cœur de Paris, c’est les p’tits poulbots
Aux figures d’archanges, aux phrases crues,
Montmartre qui s’endort dans une toile d’Utrillo,
Le cœur de Paris, c’est la rue.

The streets have changed little, even if they are a little cleaner. But there may yet be a distant echo of Maurice Chevalier and the faint odour of a freshly baked galette.

The first church on the site of Saint Praxedes is mentioned in an inscription dated 491. Restored by Pope Hadrian I (772-95) the church was entirely rebuilt by Pope Paschal I (817-24) in order to shelter the relics of Christian martyrs. The church is said to stand on the site of the house where St Praxedes sheltered early Christians, twenty-three of whom were discovered and executed in her presence.

The church contains a statue of St Praxedes clutching a sponge used to collect the blood of martyrs ( the sponge is said to be in a sarcophagus in the crypt) and behind the high altar hangs an oil painting of “St Praxedes Gathering the Blood of the Martyrs” painted in the early 18^th century by Domenico Muratori.

Quintus Cornelius Pudens was a Roman senator and a Christian. Cornelius and his wife Priscilla were among the first to be converted by St Peter in Rome and they hosted the apostle at their house. Quintus was the grandfather of four saints: Novatus, Timotheus, Praxedes and Pudentiana. In 1894 and 1960 excavations uncovered the remains of a two-storied house dated to 129 AD by brick stamps found in its eastern wall. Two layers of mosaics paved a courtyard that may have been part of the house that belonged to the Pudens family.

After the death of her father and sister, Praxedes had a church built and it was here that many Christians were hidden from persecution. When Praxedes died in AD 165, she was buried in the cemetery of Priscilla where the remains of her sister and father lay. Six centuries later, Pope Paschal I moved the relics of Praxedes, of her sister, and of some say more than 3,000 other Christians to the newly renovated Basilica of Saint Praxedes.

The church is famous for its many mosaics dating from the 9^th century. It houses a segment of the alleged pillar upon which Jesus was flogged and tortured before his crucifixion in Jerusalem. It was retrieved in the early 4th century by Saint Helena (mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine I) who at the age of eighty undertook a pilgrimage to Golgotha in the Holy Land to found churches for Christian worship and to collect relics. On a column in the nave is one of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s earliest works (photo right), a small bust of Bishop Santoni, who died in 1593.

“St Praxed’s ever was the church for peace,” wrote Robert Browning in a mostly forgotten poem called “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church”. It may be peaceful now, but the Basilica of Saint Praxedes had a bloody past.

Wallace Hartley (1878-1912) was born in Colne, Lancashire. His father was the choirmaster at Bethel Independent Methodist Chapel and it was he who introduced the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” to the congregation. Wallace sang in Bethel’s choir and learned to play the violin from a fellow congregation member.

In April 1912, Hartley was named bandmaster for the White Star Line ship RMS Titanic. At first he hesitated, not wishing to leave his fiancée, Maria Robinson, but Hartley decided that working on the maiden voyage of the Titanic would increase his chances of getting future work.

After RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and began to sink, Hartley and his fellow band members played music to help keep the passengers calm as the crew loaded the lifeboats. Many of the survivors said that he and the band continued to play until the very end. None of the band members survived the sinking.

Apparently, Hartley is on record as having said that if he were on a sinking ship, he would want his last song to be either “Nearer My God to Thee”, the hymn composed by English Christian poet Sarah Adams, or “O God our Help in Ages Past” by the famous hymn composer Isaac Watts. Survivors testified that the Titanic band played “Nearer My God to Thee”, which is what the newspapers reported.

Wireless operator Harold Bride claimed, however, that the band’s swan song was “Autumn”. There is an Episcopalian hymn whose melody is known as “Autumn”, but he might have meant the waltz “Songe d’Automne” written by Archibald Joyce in 1908 and popular at the time. Whatever they played, one newspaper reported, “The part played by the orchestra on board the Titanic in her last dreadful moments will rank among the noblest in the annals of heroism at sea.”

Hartley was recovered almost two weeks after the sinking and was supposedly found “fully dressed with his violin strapped to his body”. The funeral took place on 18 May 1912, when 1,000 people attended and 40,000 lined the route of the procession.

A violin was returned to Wallace Hartley’s fiancée Maria Robinson, in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, and a transcript of a telegram dated 19 July 1912 to Canada’s Provincial Secretary of Nova Scotia was later found in her diary. It said, “I would be most grateful if you could convey my heartfelt thanks to all who have made possible the return of my late fiancé’s violin.”

Recently a letter written by Wallace Hartley sold at auction for £93,000 ($138,000). It is dated 10 April 1912 and written on sheets of Titanic stationary bearing the company’s watermark: “Just a line to say we have got away all right. It’s been a bit of a rush but I am just getting a little settled… We have a fine band & the boys seem very nice. I have had to buy some linen & I sent my washing home today by post. I shall probably arrive home on the Sunday morning.”

Hartley never made it, but it seems that his violin did.

Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) was a commission for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, performing in Paris in 1913. As such it was a stage work brought to life by the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky with costumes and decor designed by the artist Nicholas Roerich (original design, left). The orchestra was meticulously rehearsed and unflappably conducted by Pierre Monteux, who had an ambivalent relationship with the work. In his old age he told the biographer Charles Reid, “I did not like Le Sacre then. I have conducted it fifty times since. I do not like it now.”

On 18 February 1914, The Rite received its first concert performance in St Petersburg under Serge Koussevitzky. On 5 April that year, Stravinsky experienced for himself the composition’s success at a concert performance conducted by Monteux. The Rite had its first British concert performance on 7 June 1921 under Eugene Goossens, and its American premiere on 3 March 1922 under Leopold Stokowski. Commentators generally agree that the work has greater impact in the concert hall than in the theatre.

When it was truly modern, i.e. in 1913, Le Sacre posed unusual problems for conductor and orchestra. The players faced extremes of register, seemingly perverse and complicated rhythms, and an extraordinary range of percussion instruments. Monteux had to navigate a sea of tempo changes that required eleven orchestral rehearsals to bring off. Today the work is in the repertoire of every professional orchestra. The players know its difficulties and can focus on style and sonority. Consequently, performances are judged less on bringing the work off and more on its tonal colouring and sheer excitement.

Stravinsky himself maintained that “music should be transmitted and not interpreted” and that a performer’s “talent lies precisely in his faculty for seeing what is actually in the score, and certainly not in a determination to find there what he would like to find.” Like Mahler and Bartók, Stravinsky was meticulous in marking his scores. He used a metronome and he often said that his recordings provided further confirmation of what he wanted with regard to tempo, articulation, phrasing and balance. Even so, Stravinsky the conductor often took tempi that were different from those indicated in the score by Stravinsky the composer.

In 1964, Herbert von Karajan, the legendary conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO), made his first recording of The Rite. It was reviewed by the composer in a spirit of mischief-making aimed more at critics than conductors. Stravinsky’s described Karajan’s version as “a pet savage rather than a real one”, meaning that it was too comfortable, too plush, too Austro-Hungarian. Glenn Gould, no slouch himself when it came to thinking about music, disagreed, describing it as “the most imaginative and… ‘inspired’ realisation” then on record.

In 1975, after several concert performances during the early 1970s, Karajan re-recorded the work with the BPO. It was a “one-take” performance of remarkable intensity, revelling in the pagan ritual that informs the music. The BPO demonstrated that savagery and coarseness do not equate with authenticity and that even Stravinsky’s works can be interpreted to great effect.

Now we have Sir Simon Rattle’s centenary version, with all the verve and passion of an orchestra that can play anything, whose soloists are imaginative and fearless, and a conductor for whom The Rite is as mother’s milk. Ordinary mortals may never know what it is like to be at home in the playground of the gods…

Picture this and think of Texas:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is George W. Bush, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’”

There are four big questions surrounding George W. Bush’s presidency. How effective and how just were his counterterrorism policies? What is the long-term impact of his fiscal policies? Did federal education standards actually improve the nation’s schools? What was the result of engaging in pre-emptive wars? These are not just questions for historians to debate. They are questions that impact the lives of everyday people both in the USA and in many countries outside.

The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum was officially dedicated on 25 April 2013 on the campus of Southern Methodist University in a ceremony attended by President Obama and four ex-presidents. For a whole day the partisan rancor that marked George Bush’s tenure was set aside, despite President Obama having previously asserted that “The failed policies of George W. Bush…” wiped away a budget surplus and “squandered the legacy” of bipartisan foreign policy. He put two wars “on a credit card”, led the country away “from our values” and “crashed the economy.”

The $250 million complex houses the 13th official presidential library. The exhibits use modern gadgetry and 25 different films and interactive videos. No President creates a museum overflowing with self-criticism and this one is no exception. It does not ignore controversies such as the weapons of mass destruction that were never found in Iraq, but it does not dwell on them either. In the Iraq display it points out that, “No stockpiles of WMD were found.” But then it adds by way of self-serving justification, “Post-invasion inspections confirmed that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to resume production of WMD.”

There is a statue of Bush Jr. standing slightly forward of (some might say in the shadow of) Bush Sr. There is a section devoted to Laura Bush’s travels, a video by his daughters and even statues of the family dogs and cat. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s Secretary of State, and his two chiefs of staff all narrate videos. But conspicuous by their absence are former Vice-President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove, the president’s political strategist, who only make cameo appearances in news footage.

The centerpiece of the Bush library is an interactive exhibit known as “Decision Points Theater”. Against footage of breaking news and short videos of “advice” from actors posing as officials and military top brass, visitors use touch screens to make their own decisions on the crises that defined the Bush era. The ex-President then pops up on a screen to justify the steps he took on the invasion of Iraq, the subsequent troop surge, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis.

Bush wrote in his 2010 memoir that “it’s too early to say how most of my decisions will turn out… Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I’m comfortable with the fact that I won’t be around to hear it.” Yet, he left office as one of the most unpopular presidents in recent history. Critics say Bush invaded Iraq on false pretenses, mismanaged the occupation and thereby weakened America’s global power and moral standing. The aftermath of Katrina in 2005 is the nadir of how not to handle natural disasters. And Bush’s failure to spot an onrushing financial meltdown led to the greatest recession since the 1930s.

Former Bush aides hope the opening of the library will mark the first step in his rehabilitation. “Those eight years of the Bush presidency were full of shocks,” said one of Bush’s most trusted senior aides. “As time passes, as emotions begin to even out after a very difficult and consequential time, people take a much more objective look.” Sounds like they’re looking for a whitewash. History’s verdict is likely to be more severe:

“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

In 2007 Spain’s Congress of Deputies ratified “The Bill to recognise and extend rights and to establish measures in favour of those who suffered persecution or violence during the Civil War and the Dictatorship” (commonly known as the Law of Historical Memory). It officially recognizes the crimes committed against civilians under the rule of the country’s long-time dictator General Franco.

Contemporary research leads most historians to acknowledge that some 100,000 people were summarily executed by Franco’s Nationalists during Spain’s Civil War (1936-39) and tens of thousands more afterwards. New histories and in-depth local studies support the conclusion that, “The wide-ranging nature of Nationalist terror was not coincidental, a by-product of civil war, but reflected a much deeper ideological outlook that sought to purge the ‘anti-Spain’ and eliminate the cancer of ‘communism’” (The Spanish Civil War, Andy Duggan, 2007). Franco not only knew what was happening, he personally authorized the crimes.

Franco died in 1975. In March 2006, the Permanent Commission of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the “multiple and serious violations” of human rights committed in Spain under Franco’s regime from 1939 to 1975. The resolution was the first official international condemnation of the horrors and it began the erosion of Spain’s pacto de silencio, intended to suppress dialogue about the past in the interest of moving on.

In 2007, the Spanish government banned official public references to the Franco regime and removed all statues, street names and memorials associated with it. In 2010 one of the last remaining statues of El Caudillo was taken down from the army headquarters in Valencia. Yet, one of the most notorious symbols of his rule still exists on a hillside 30 miles north of Madrid, where a 500 ft granite cross soars above a mausoleum hewn out of rock and built using forced labour.

After Franco’s death, King Juan Carlos decided to have him buried at Valle de los Caídos, a colossal memorial that in name honours all the casualties of the Spanish Civil War. Designed by Franco it is distinctly nationalist. In 2011 a panel of experts, convened to determine the fate of the Valley of the Fallen, recommended that Franco’s remains be exhumed from the site and the basilica converted into a place of reconciliation. But relatives of Franco opposed the move and so far nothing has been done.

Franco’s family is still living off the proceeds of terror and murder. Estimates of the family’s accumulated wealth range from 350 to 600 million Euros. In addition to Franco’s ill-gotten wealth, when he was sick, the Cortes voted a pension for his wife. At the time of her death in 1988, she was still receiving more than 12.5 million pesetas (four million more than Felipe González, the then head of government). Under dubious circumstances, the family took possession of several properties, including the Pazo de Meirás – a manor house “given” to Franco at the end of the Civil War – that the Galician authorities have long been trying to get back.

The fortune amassed by Franco during four decades of dictatorship was conveniently forgotten after the country’s transition to democracy. It provided the money for his extended family to maintain their opulent lifestyle. In the context of today’s more politically aware younger generation, and especially that of an economic crisis that has profoundly affected Spain, radical solutions are being sought to the political, social and cultural legacies of the civil war. Memories run deep, especially among those who suffered most.

Seventy-four years after the end of the Civil War, and thirty-eight years after the death of Franco, it’s time for Spain to renounce its pact of silence, to challenge impunity, to come to terms with its past, and to judge its legacy of oppression.