Tag: history

This interview, conducted in English, was originally published in Welsh (‘Tywod Porthcawl:  Mynd am Dro gyda Robert Minhinnick’) in O’r Pedwar Gwynt (OPG), spring 2020.   RM: We’ve made this walk from the Buccaneer and the fairground – the shows – and through Trecco Bay because you see modern leisure – or old fashioned working-class leisure – […]
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Patagonian Bones

Lee Tisdale explores the history of Welsh culture as he gives a sentimental review of the film Patagonian Bones (2015).

PUBLISHED ON: 06/03/20

CATEGORY: Blog

26th February, 7:20 PM. The information desk at Ceredigion Museum had no lights on, and the streets around it were almost empty. Standing in front of …

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Literary Atlas: Plotting English Novels in Wales

Daniel Snipe finds himself reconnecting with the fiction and history of his own city through the Literary Atlas project

PUBLISHED ON: 21/02/20

CATEGORY: Blog

On 5 February, the zoology lecture rooms of Swansea University played host to a talk on literature by Dr Kieron Smith. He is a lecturer at Swansea Uni …

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Dear Mona: Letters from a Conscientious Objector

Assessing these missives from the twentieth century, the last great age of letter-writing, John Barnie is fascinated by what they reveal about the artist formerly known as Len Jones, including a conscientious objector’s forestry work, presence at the Battle of the Bulge, relieving Bergen-Belsen, picking a side in post-war Palestine and fending off unwanted professions of love from a man and a woman

PUBLISHED ON: 29/01/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

Sometime after he completed the biography of his father, the artist Jonah Jones, Peter Jones was approached by a nephew of Mona Lovell, the woman who …

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Shards of Light

Nathan Llywelyn Munday hails a prophetic figure in his tenth decade, who, ‘in winter’, observes starlight and sighs like the Magi when ‘the glitter of inexplicable messages’ threatens a gloomy sky

PUBLISHED ON: 29/01/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

When I received a copy of Emyr Humphreys’ Shards of Light, I expected a kind of archaeological poetry. These previously unpublished poems are written …

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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

Alex Diggins grapples with an illuminating – but often dense – new history of capitalism, climate change and colonialism

PUBLISHED ON: 29/01/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

Capitalism has many relics. It is an ideology around which objects restlessly cohere. One such artefact is the smartphone on which you are perhaps rea …

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A Simple Scale

Chris Moss is enticed by this fast-thickening, genre-busting time-spanning global intrigue, spanning Soviet Russia and McCarthyite Hollywood, which has rich texture, psychological nuance and the slow build of literature

PUBLISHED ON: 29/01/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

Just about everything about this book is enticing, at least for anyone who likes a bit of East European/Russian sophistication and prefers their suspe …

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Caradoc Evans: the Devil in Eden

Liz Jones assesses this blockbuster, by his editor and bibliographer over three decades, of the controversial, reviled trailblazer

PUBLISHED ON: 29/01/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

Caradoc Evans’ reputation will not leave him alone. More than a century after the publication of My People, his debut collection of short stories, the …

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The Glass Aisle

Paul Henry movingly brings to mind the impoverished poor of a bygone age in the title poem and centrepiece of this collection, writes CM Buckland

PUBLISHED ON: 29/01/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

In this semi-surreal journey through the present and past, Henry’s narrator walks us through the seasons and along a section of canal in Powys, sheddi …

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Try the Wilderness First: Eric Gill and David Jones at Capel-y-Ffin

While a borderland hamlet may seem a useful site to locate contradictory morality, Kieron Smith writes, this book focusing mainly on Gill the artist who designed the BBC logo’s typeface, does not deal with the extent to which British entitlement can hide in plain sight

PUBLISHED ON: 30/10/18

CATEGORY: Reviews

Borders are a favourite theme among literary and cultural critics. Usually they are presented as sites of interaction and exchange, ‘liminal’ spaces w …

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