Thursdays with Leila exemplifies the slapdash style and narrative verve, piety and subversion, timeless myth and topicality that made Cor n Tellado the queen of the Spanish romance. Of a later generation than Britain's Barbara Cartland or France's Delly, she, like them, nevertheless wrote in a society tensed between the inexorable development of modernity and a deep-rooted social conservatism. Tellado's tales of love, and of women's difficult...