Year: 2026
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Port Talbot, the novel: Jon Doyle’s ‘Communion’
Port Talbot has waited a long time for the novel it deserves. Now it has one: Communion, the first long work of fiction by Jon Doyle, who was brought up in the town, and still lives there. If you know Port Talbot you’ll soon recognise many of the places that feature in the book –…
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Whistler in Venice: etchings
By 1879 James McNeill Whistler was 45 years old and in a bad way. He’d won his libel case against John Ruskin’s accusation that he’d ‘flung a pot of paint into the public’s face’, but was awarded only a farthing in damages. He’d lost an important and generous patron, Frederick Leyland. In fact, by now…
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Geoff Dyer grows up
Geoff Dyer is one of those authors who never writes the same book twice. He’s produced around twenty of them so far, on a kaleidoscopic range of subjects, including the history of photography, India, Soviet film, the First World War, jazz heroes, Roger Federer and war movies. My favourite is Out of sheer rage: wrestling…
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St Illtud’s Walk, day 8: Afan Argoed to Margam
It’s taken four bus rides, via Swansea, Port Talbot and Pontrhydyfen, but by ten o’clock I’ve reached the visitor centre at Afan Argoed, where C. and I ended Day 7 in July 2024. I can’t really explain why it’s taken over a year and a half to reconnect with St Illtud. The weather’s often been…
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On active travel
Who could object to ‘active travel’? Who could possibly deny its health, environmental and economic benefits? Who could be in favour of being unfit or overweight, or encouraging unsafe roads, traffic jams, potholes and pollution? So, if it’s so obvious a virtue, why is active travel – walking and cycling as the natural mode of…
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Mae Sion Trefor yn pendwmpian
Mae gwedd y dyn hwn yn fy atgoffa o Wncl Jack, yn ei hen dŷ yn Howden, Swydd Efrog ddwyreiniol, nôl yn y 1960au. Wedi i’n mam-gu glirio’r ford ar ôl pryd mawr canol dydd a dianc i’r gegin, dyma ein tad a’i frawd yn encilio i stafell dawel yng nghefn y tŷ i orweddian…
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After reading
Is reading dying? On Radio 4 there’s a thoughtful series of three programmes by James Marriott that poses this question. He’s not so much worried that functional literacy is failing, though it’s certainly a problem that so many children leave school without the skills to read their way into coping with the everyday world. What…
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Gwen again
If you don’t know the art of Gwen John and your mind is open to her subtle talent, the National Museum’s exhibition, Gwen John: strange beauties, will be a revelation. If you do, it will still be a revelation. That’s for two reasons. First, it assembles a large number of her works, from around the…
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Tywyswyr iaith
Yn hwyr yn y ddeunawfed ganrif tyfodd proffesiwn newydd yng Nghymru. Ei swyddogaeth oedd gwasanaethu’r ffrwd o foneddigion, y rhan fwyaf ohonynt o Loegr, a ddymunai ddringo mynyddoedd y gogledd. Tywyswyr oedd y rhain. Eu tasg oedd arwain yr ymwelwyr ar hyd y llwybrau, eu hatal rhag syrthio ar greigiau, gofalu am eu hanghenion corfforol…
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Three faces of Gwen John
I’m looking forward to seeing the big Gwen John exhibition at National Museum Wales in Cardiff. Few people now ask ‘Who is Gwen John?’, though it’s taken more than half a century for the world to catch up with Augustus John’s reported assessment of her work after she died in 1939: ‘in fifty years’ time…