‘Ya no es malo ni es bueno. Sólo es historia’ [It is no longer either good or bad. It is just history]. So says Arturo Pérez-Reverte when discussing Spain’s past, and the temptation to use that past for political ends. His point is that history, the past, is only dangerous when it is manipulated in the present. We need not fear it except when we are ignorant about it, for then others can retell it, reshape it and, in so doing, mould it and us to their purposes. However, knowledge of events, a memory of them, whether direct or indirect, may protect against sinister use of the past. If we use this notion as a starting point, it is easy to see that Pérez-Reverte is a man on a mission, whose ambition is to rescue the Spanish past as accurately as possible, and to pass on a sense of that past to the coming generations, or as he puts it, ‘luchar contra la desmemoria’, (‘to struggle against dismemory’). His use of the word ‘desmemoria’ is an interesting one because it suggests that younger generations might not have forgotten their inherited past. They simply never knew it. It does not mean ‘amnesia’ or ‘forgetfulness’, since both those words imply that there was a memory there to be forgotten. He blames this phenomenon of ‘dismemory’ on both the Francoist regime's treatment of the past, and later educational reforms under then Ministers Solana and Maravall: