In 1986, the historian John Elliott published a massive biography of a 17th-century Spanish statesman, Gaspar de Guzmán, the count-duke of Olivares. John, who has died aged 91, had already published numerous acclaimed books although his first, Nibble the Squirrel, written for children in 1946, is a lesser-known part of the canon.
Although already a toweringly influential historian in Britain, Spain and the US, with his 1963 work Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 still regarded as the go-to introduction to the Habsburg period, it was the bombshell of the 1986 biography that put Olivares on the map and was probably instrumental in John’s elevation in 1990 to the regius chair of modern history at Oxford.
