Year: 2020
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Cymru a W.G. Sebald
Cyhoeddodd W.G. Sebald Austerlitz, ei nofel olaf (os mai nofel yw hi) yn Almaeneg yn 2001. Pan ddaeth y fersiwn Saesneg allan yn 2002, roedd yn syndod i ddarllenwyr yma i ddarganfod mai Cymru yw un o’i phrif leoliadau, mewn llyfr sy’n crwydro dros rannau helaeth o gyfandir Ewrop. Hanes dyn o’r enw Jacques Austerlitz…
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Time and Johannes Vermeer
Today’s the last day of my imaginary return visit to the city of Delft. As always, it’s been a time of rest and contemplation among the canals and step-gabled houses facing them. And as usual I’ve been thinking about Delft’s most famous citizen, Johannes Vermeer, and his paintings – this time, the early works that…
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Dido Harding: a failed state in microcosm
I thought I recognised the name Dido Harding, when her name popped up on the news recently. After all, Dido isn’t the commonest of names. There’s Dido, the excellent singer, and Dido Twite, the heroine of Black hearts in Battersea and other stories by Joan Aiken. And, of course, the original, wonderful and tragic Dido,…
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The assassin waits
In my lockdown tour of Europe I’m still enjoying my virtual stay in the city of Delft. I’ve walked a little way from the Nieuwe Kerk to the Prinsenhof in Sint Agathaplein. Today the Prinsenhof is a museum, and a very good one, but in the late sixteenth century it was the government headquarters of…
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Carel Fabritius’s ‘A view of Delft’
You can take a train to Delft – or you could, in pre-Virus times – walk to the corner of Oude Langendijk and the Oosteinde in the city centre, look to the north-west, and see what the painter Carel Fabritius saw there on a bright summer’s day in 1652. A few things have changed, it’s…
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On sparrows
Obituaries lift the heart. They’re the part of any newspaper or magazine to turn to first if you want to cheer yourself up by reading about the positive side of human nature. At the moment, when the news pages resemble an unending nightmare by Hieronymus Bosch, that’s especially true. Last week I read on Twitter…
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Covid-19: pam mae Prydain mor drychinebus?
Erbyn hyn mae’n amlwg fod Prydain yn dioddef o’r pla yn waeth nag unrhyw wlad yn Ewrop. Amlwg hefyd mai esgeulustod llywodraeth y DU yw un o’r prif resymau. Ei methiant i ymateb i’r firws yn brydlon. Ei methiant i ddarparu offer ar gyfer unedau triniaeth ddwys, a dillad i warchod pawb oedd mewn cyswllt…
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Durer’s ‘A heavenly body’: painting apocalypse
Albrecht Durer surely had the sharpest eye of any painter. Think of his watercolour A big piece of turf, made in 1503, half a millennium before the hyperrealist painters of our own time. Or the astonishing sketch of his own head and hand on the reverse of the painting in Paris known as Portrait of…
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Cefn Bryn and the painters
Looking out of the window of my lockdown attic, I’ve a south-west view of south Gower. If I stretch my neck I can see the eastern end of the ridge of Cefn Bryn, the long sandstone backbone of the peninsula. All through the bright days of April the sun has set, often spectacularly, on one…
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‘Reports of my death’: the many lives of Jean Rhys
False news is now so natural a part of our world that few people are surprised to read about the deaths of people who remain stubbornly alive. There are plenty of examples, many of them recent. Wikipedia lists over 300 in one of its more amusing pages, List of premature obituaries. The ‘reported death’ people…