SPAIN: Duchess Dynamite

As the most audacious opponent of Franco inside Spain, Luisa María Narváez y Macías, fifth Duchess of Valencia, was restless in the quiet of her ancestral palace at Avila. But she had promised, after her third sojourn in Franco's jails, to withdraw from active politics for a while. So she rode horseback, drove her sleek Cadillac with the ducal crest on it, ran a charity kitchen in a wing of her palace, and wrote her memoirs. There was plenty to write about, including her expulsion, at the age of ten, from a convent for throwing an inkwell at the...

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