Miner’s Day by BL Coombes, with illustrations [‘Rhondda images’] by Isabel Alexander; Peter Wakelin (ed) (Parthian) The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain by Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson (Verso) Representing the Male: Masculinity, Genre and Social Context in Six South Wales Novels by John Perrott Jenkins (UWP) Coal miners have […]
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Lady Charlotte Guest: The Exceptional Life of a Female Industrialist

Dr Wyn Thomas finds this a riveting and well-crafted account of an industrialist, philanthropist and the Mabinogi’s first editor and translator

PUBLISHED ON: 25/01/22

CATEGORY: Reviews

I began reading Victoria Owen’s account of Lady Charlotte Guest, knowing little about Lady Charlotte and what she accomplished. On concluding the book …

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Early Twentieth-century Welsh Plays in English, Vol 1: ‘A Dirty Broth’

Chris Moss assesses how this anthology of classic plays (including Taffy by Caradoc Evans) identifies the factors that deprived Wales of a recognisable tradition of playwriting and how these three plays share themes of religion, community, identity and family

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

The first volume of a two-book series devoted to Welsh writing for the theatre,  A Dirty Broth, contains the complete texts of just three plays. You m …

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Saints and Lodgers: Poems of WH Davies

Chris Moss identifies something of Newport in the original Supertramp who belonged to no poetry school

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

I am the Poet Davies, William, I sin without a blush or blink: I am a man that lives to eat; I am a man that lives to drink   Thus, with the easy …

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The Greatest Need: The Creative Life and Troubled Times of Lily Tobias, a Welsh Jew in Palestine, by Jasmine Donahaye

Eluned Gramich

PUBLISHED ON: 11/02/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Eluned Gramich sings in praise of readers of unkosher novels and among them, Lily Tobias, the subject of Jasmine Donahaye’s expert biography in Honno’ …

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Swansea Automatic

Kieron Smith champions this poetry collection – part science-textbook pastiche, part local history, part guidebook – on a city that refuses to be pinned down

PUBLISHED ON: 29/01/20

CATEGORY: Opinion, Reviews

How does a colour become a symbolic colour? How does a place become a symbolic place? Why is this book about SWANSEA and not ABERYSTWYTH or LONDON? In …

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Water, Water, Nowhere

Heledd Williams

PUBLISHED ON: 22/10/19

CATEGORY: Fiction

Mattie tried to remain composed while she faced the IriScan, keeping her features relaxed so the pigment algorithm of her irises could be analysed. It …

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Abel Thomas and Sons Butter Merchants Ltd

Elizabeth Griffiths

PUBLISHED ON: 23/07/19

CATEGORY: Fiction

‘The Abel family had business in its blood.’ So writes DJ Williams of my mother’s forbears in his deeply felt memoir of nineteenth-century Carmarthens …

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It’s Gone Dark Over Bill’s Mother’s

Liz Jones

PUBLISHED ON: 26/06/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

A china sausage dog – the centrepiece of a grandmother’s fireplace – becomes a tragi-comic memento mori of the industry that once sustained an entire …

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Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North

John Barnie follows the author along Finland’s north-west coast on the Otso (a floating high technology palace whose job it is to clear ports and cut ships free of ice) and revels in how he communicates the physicality of this unfamiliar environment, from the smell of ‘blunt steel’ to ‘something neither solid nor liquid under the snow’

PUBLISHED ON: 23/10/18

CATEGORY: Reviews

In Down to the Sea in Ships (2014), Horatio Clare told the story of his voyage around the world on a container ship. In Icebreaker, he takes to the se …

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