A driving force in writing this book was the conviction that there was a wealth of intellectual history that risked being lost through a process of cultural desmemoria. It was coupled with another conviction, namely that if we only looked at the histories of individuals, or those of institutions, we missed something. The interactive nature of individuals with one another, and with their institutions, is as significant an element in the trafficking of knowledge as is any single interaction of either with the outside world.

These interactions are challenging to map, but the preceding chapters have aimed to capture different areas of a complex landscape. This has varied and developed along the chronological trajectory from the turn of the century to the Civil War, but it has also been variable geographically, not least in the divide between city and country, and most prominently between Madrid and the rest of Spain. One of the most striking features of the cultural panorama in Spain through these years is not simply the richness of activity that can be perceived in some areas of the population, with the undoubted capacity to reach out, to import and to receive that which is foreign to Spain.