25-04-2025
Lost work reveals swashbuckling writer's feud with king's favourite
The swashbuckling Spanish Golden Age writer and spy Francisco de Quevedo assailed his enemies with a sword and a sharpened quill.
Club-footed, short-sighted and a dedicated patron of brothels, Quevedo did not cut a conventionally romantic figure. But the nobleman's satirical poetry, picaresque tales such as the bleak El Buscón — The Swindler — and his belligerence immortalised him.
He killed a man in a duel in 1611 after he saw his opponent striking a woman in a Madrid church, according to tradition. His lifelong rivalry with Luis de Góngora, a fellow literary star, prompted him to pen screeds of poisonous, often antisemitic invective, aimed at his opponent's nose. 'There was a man glued to a nose … there was a bearded swordfish,' he wrote.
