What are museums for?
The 2021 Richard Burton Lecture in Swansea University was given this week by David Anderson, Director General of Amgueddfa Cymru (‘Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales’, to give it its hyper-awkward formal name). His title was ‘Do Welsh museums matter?’ It was a learned and a challenging talk, raising crucial questions about the role of […]
The alienist
Last week I was felled by a mysterious (non-Covid) illness. The doctor’s best guess was that it was caused by ‘Virus X’, a hard-to-pin-down invader that was powerful enough to wreak temporary havoc with my body. (My father-in-law, who was also a GP, would have written on my notes the letters ‘SKV’, short for ‘Some […]
Brwydr hir Rachel Barrett
Mae’n ddigon hysbys mai mudiad dosbarth canol, ar y cyfan, oedd y mudiad i ennill y bleidlais i ferched yn y DU yn ystod y blynyddoedd cyn y Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf. Cryfder oedd hyn i’r graddau fod gan yr ymgyrchwyr y sgiliau a’r hyder i ymgyrchu, a mynediad i rwydweithiau cymdeithasol dylanwadol. Ond golygodd absenoldeb […]
Learning about Welsh history
Estyn has published a review of teaching Welsh history in schools, including specifically the teaching of BAME history. It makes gloomy reading for anyone who believes that understanding where we are now in Wales, and where we might be in future, depend on a reasonable knowledge of how we got here. During the last twenty […]
The black man and the atheist
I’ve been reading, for the first time, A pilgrim’s progress. I suspect that’s a rare event these days, at least in this country. It’s easy to forget that John Bunyan’s book was for several centuries the most widely-read book in English, after the Bible, and the English book most often translated into other languages. Calvinists, […]
Moonrise
Among the eleven ‘Welsh sonnets’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins are counted some of the outstanding poems written in English in the nineteenth century. They include ‘God’s grandeur’, ‘Pied beauty’ and ‘The windhover’. Hopkins came to live in St Beuno’s College near Tremeichion in the Vale of Clwyd in August 1874 to continue his extremely long […]
Who would live in Wales?
This week the Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (RhLC from now on) wrote an article sparked by the campaign by Vaughan Gething, the minister for the Welsh economy, to persuade young people born or raised in Wales not to emigrate. An important part of her, she says, is Welsh – she grew up in north […]
John Clare and the snipe
Slow radio at its best achieves what no amount of ‘fast radio’, with its assumption of the attention span of a hoverfly, can achieve: thought connections that stay in the mind long after the programme has ended. Paul Farley’s recent day (half an hour on the radio: The Poet and the Snipe) looking, in vain, […]
Ar ben pella’r byd
Dyma’r ffordd o’i chyrraedd. Edrychwch am droad i’r dde wrth ichi deithio tua’r gorllewin ar y ffordd i ben pella’r penrhyn. Mae’n hawdd ei golli. Cadwch eich llygaid ar agor am fryn coediog gyferbyn ar y chwith. Wedi troi, mae’r lôn syth yn disgyn yn raddol â llain o lawnt ar y ddwy ochr. Ar […]
The ageing of Henri Rouart
Henri Rouart was one of Edgar Degas’ oldest and most loyal friends. They went to same school in Paris, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and served in the artillery together during the Franco-Prussian War (Degas was an indifferent soldier). Rouart became an engineer and industrial designer, specialising in vapour-compressed refrigeration. He owned a successful company and used his […]
