Author: Andrew Green
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With the co-operation of William Hazell
Alun Burge’s new book William Hazell’s gleaming vision (Y Lolfa, 2014) is an important work, at once a celebration and an archaeological excavation. It uncovers an era and a culture almost forgotten today, and restores to both the place they deserve in our common history. Thanks to two generations of talented historians the labour movement…
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Starlings and Coleridge
“Starlings in vast flights drove along like smoke, mist, or any thing misty without volition – now a circular area inclined in an Arc – now a Globe – now from complete Orb into an Elipse & Oblong – now a balloon with the car suspended, now a concaved Semicircle – & still it expands…
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Bigism
The Big Mac, which celebrates its fortieth birthday this year, must have started it. The obsession with bigness. By now we take it for granted, without a conscious thought. Everything you get is going to be big, by default, unless you make a special plea for small. Even then you might get something that’s only…
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‘Caitlin’
Wrth i ‘flwyddyn Dylan’ ddirwyn i ben – ar ôl misoedd o ddathliadau dwys sy wedi ymylu ar fod yn ‘Dylanolatri’ – mae’n briodol iawn bod peth sylw yn cael ei roi i’w wraig Caitlin. Nos Fawrth yn Volcano yn Abertawe fe welais berfformiad byw, rhyw awr o hyd, o’r enw ‘Caitlin’, sy’n dramateiddio’r berthynas…
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Anselm Kiefer and Rembrandt van Rijn
Visit the big retrospective of Anselm Kiefer in the Royal Academy and it’s unlikely that you’ll quickly forget it. Which is apt, because memory, personal and especially collective, is the big theme that runs through all his work since he began his career as an artist in 1969. For Kiefer memory is seldom direct or…
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Vivienne Williams
Still life as a genre has a long history. Pictures of plenty – fruits of nature arranged by human hand – are common on Roman painted walls and mosaics. Renaissance artists picked out collections of food, natural and prepared, from the incidental details of medieval paintings and placed them centre stage. The golden age of…
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Y lle gwag
Tua milltir o’n tŷ ni, ar ymyl y brif ffordd i lawr i’r pentref, mae lle gwag. Rhyw erw o dir gwastad rhwng dau dŷ. Gefeilliaid yw’r tai – adeiladau golygus wedi’u gosod dipyn oddi ar y ffordd, â bargod eang, a theils coch yn gorchuddio’r rhan uwch o’u waliau. Yn wreiddiol, mae’n amlwg, gardd…
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Nightwalking
The literature of walking is large. It’s grown quickly in recent years, in part as an offshoot of the ‘new nature writing’. Most of it, though, is concerned with walking in the light of day. Nightwalking has received much less treatment. Frédéric Gros, in his recent A philosophy of walking (2014) fails to mention it.…
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Delft in four colours
Orange Orange is the Dutch colour. But to see it in Delft you need to lift your eyes above the roads and canals to the tops of the buildings. Big bright orange pantiles run in vertical rows down the small hipped roofs of many houses, each of which is different in size and height from…
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Bombs over Iraq, then and now
1920s The Ottoman Empire collapsed after its defeat in the First World War, and the victorious British took control of Mesopotamia. In April 1920 the League of Nations granted them a mandate, effectively imperial rule until the country was ‘mature’ enough for independence, to administer the whole area, now renamed Iraq. Even before the mandate,…