Cervantes the seer

William Egginton opens his book with a novelistic reimagining: here’s Miguel de Cervantes, a toothless old geezer of nearly 60, on his way to the printers with his new manuscript.

On a hot August day in 1604, a man walked through the dusty streets of Valladolid, Spain, clutching in his right hand a heavy package. In the absence of any authentic portraits, we must trust his own words to know that he was brown-haired and silver-bearded, with an aquiline (but well-proportioned, he adds) nose and cheerful eyes partly hidden behind a pair of smeared spectacles resembling, in the words of one of his literary rivals, badly fried eggs.

By the time Cervantes published Don Quixote, he’d done a lot of living. A raddled figure on the down-at-heel fringes of the gentry, he had lost the use of his left hand when it was hit by a harquebus at the Battle of Lepanto.