Tag: history

Free content

Land of Whose Fathers?

A digital project aims to map land ownership across Wales – and you can help. Chris Moss talks to Dr Sioned Hâf, creator of Who Owns Wales/Pwy Bia Cymru, in this feature-length essay

PUBLISHED ON: 01/04/21

CATEGORY: Column, Essays, Opinion

Land is an enigma. It is soil, roads, houses and mountains, but more than any or all of those. It is, in a sense, all we have as humans. It is everywh …

Read more
Subscribers only

The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti

Ian Cutler on a reverse travelogue/social archaeological survey of Los Angeles’ marginalised visitors and inhabitants, from hobos to taggers

PUBLISHED ON: 23/02/21

CATEGORY: Reviews

  The text and prolific illustrations that make up The City Beneath provides a hundred-year cultural history of Los Angeles and its environs, fro …

Read more
Subscribers only

Reflections: Preview of the photography book, Form

Paul Cabuts on the influence of Walker Evans’ American Photographs on his own Valleys images, and the interplay of social disadvantage and monochrome

PUBLISHED ON: 23/02/21

CATEGORY: Essays, Preview

A night class at the old school on top of Stow Hill in Trefforest would prove decisive. I had already experienced years of taking photographs, learnin …

Read more
Subscribers only

Who is Briton Tom? Interview with Robert Minhinnick in Porthcawl

Llŷr Gwyn goes on foot with the poet, from Porthcawl’s Bucaneer pub, through Trecco Bay, to the dunes, and finds out about how Robert Minhinnick is pursued by sand, ‘saving the bunny rabbits’, imposter syndrome, archaeology, the Blair glory years for the arts, a fear of things being obliterated, and the importance of a chorus to a poem

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Interview

This interview, conducted in English, was originally published in Welsh (‘Tywod Porthcawl:  Mynd am Dro gyda Robert Minhinnick’) in O’r Pedwar Gwynt ( …

Read more
Subscribers only

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 …

Read more
Subscribers only

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 …

Read more
Subscribers only

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 …

Read more
Subscribers only

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 …

Read more
Subscribers only

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 …

Read more
Subscribers only

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 …

Read more