Kind of Spain

Django Reinhardt was the first hugely influential jazz figure to emerge from Europe and he remains the most influential European to this day, with possible competition from Joe Zawinul, George Shearing, John McLaughlin, his old cohort Stephane Grappelli and a bare handful of others. A free-spirited gypsy, Reinhardt wasn't the most reliable person in the world, frequently wandering off into the countryside on a whim. Yet Reinhardt came up with a unique way of propelling the humble acoustic guitar into the front line of a jazz combo in the days before amplification became widespread.

During a long and uncommonly productive career, Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida achieved a ubiquity in popular music that has yet to be fully recognized. Largely responsible for the Brazilian/North American "samba jazz" that would eventually catch on in the form of a musical trend known as bossa nova, he played behind dozens of well-known pop vocalists and improved the overall texture of many a studio production ensemble.

Once again billed as Montgomery Wood, Giuliano Gemma plays a civil war soldier who returns to his family land to find his family decimated, his property taken over by a family of Mexican bandits and his fiancee about to marry the Mexican gangster behind all this. Bent on revenge, he goes undercover disguised as a Mexican and discovers he has a daughter!

Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis (1922–98) shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930 when Gaddis was at boarding-school and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and are all the more valuable because Gaddis was not an autobiographical writer.

EARLY seventeenth-century Europe was a dangerous place. The resulting Thirty Years War was to claim more lives proportionately than either the First or Second World Wars – not only from battle and the endemic violence of marauding armies, but also from famine and plague. In the wake of events in far off Bohemia in 1618, there ensued a bitter struggle encompassing the entire political and religious future of Europe, and involving in one way or another all the major players of the Continent – from the Habsburg monarchs of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, to the Bourbon rulers of France, and the renowned King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, as well as Denmark, England and, more crucially still, the emerging Dutch Republic of the United Provinces.