"In the 20th century, neither Kafka nor Nabokov, Borges, Bellow or Kundera could have clothed their worlds in fiction without the pattern furnished by their Spanish ancestor. One might go even further: Don Quixote's influence has been super-literary—without it the French revolution, with its notion that individuals can be right, society wrong, might never have happened, and Martin Luther King Jr might never have delivered a speech that contained the words 'I have a dream.'"
"A rational Quixote" by Julian Evans at Prospect.
