Ian Robertson, Hispanophile and author of engaging and scholarly Blue Guides to European countries – obituary

Ian Robertson, the journey author, who has died in Arles aged 92, regarded swathes of continental Europe as his “Empire”; nicely he would possibly, as hundreds of appreciative connoisseurs travelled throughout Spain, Portugal, France, Cyprus, Eire, Austria and Switzerland along with his scholarly Blue Guides. Robertson wrote 9 Blue Guides, injecting every with an enticing mixture of acerbic wit, inventive element and encyclopaedic data.

He got here to writing by probability after an early profession in music and ebook publishing, and subsequently in antiquarian books with Bertram Rota and Maggs Brothers, earlier than serving to to edit one of many early Blue Guides. These complete nation guides have been revealed by Ernest Benn, who commissioned him to write down on Spain. Robertson and his French Basque spouse Marie Thérèse settled there within the early Nineteen Seventies so they might discover the nation correctly.

The couple had met in London the place Marie Thérèse, a chemist, was working, they usually married in 1957. They purchased a home within the hilltop city of Pedraza, close to Segovia, and the Blue Information to Spain emerged in 1975, operating to 5 editions.

It’s a problem to journey in Spain and discover a church or cloister which Robertson didn’t write about. In his personal phrases, he set out “to not omit, besides maybe intentionally, something that might be conspicuous by its absence which could enchantment to the clever customer”. For that his spouse should additionally take credit score; she was his supervisor and chauffeuse, as Robertson didn’t drive.

The identical could be mentioned of his different Blue Guides which adopted over two productive many years. By the Nineties, nonetheless, the market was altering, and Benn’s successors started to concentrate on regional and quick break metropolis guides. In that sense, Robertson was one of many final of a technology of writers of scholarly nation guides, and arguably probably the greatest.

Spain, and notably the Englishmen who ventured there, remained Robertson’s abiding curiosity. He was a number one authority on the Peninsular Battle and on the early journey writers and diarists, particularly the Hispanophile Richard Ford.

His scholarship resulted in books on Wellington’s campaigns in addition to the authoritative Los Curiosos Impertinentes about English travellers in Spain within the 18th and nineteenth centuries, which was revealed in Spanish in 1977, and Richard Ford, a serious biography revealed in 2004. He additionally edited Ford’s Hand-Guide for Travellers in Spain and Gatherings from Spain and helped curate an exhibition of Ford’s drawings on the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid in 2014.