books
Goodbye, Paul Durcan
When the news came recently that Paul Durcan had died, I pulled from the shelf my copy of his sequence of poems, Crazy about women, published by the National Gallery of Ireland in 1991. They’re all inspired by paintings in the Gallery’s collection. Some of the poems are long, some short; some playful, others penetrating […]
Cerddwyr coll: Seosamh Mac Grianna a Hamish Fulton
Profiad cyffredin ond anochel, on’d yw e? Yn syth ar ôl ichi gyhoedd llyfr, dych chi’n dod o hyd i themâu neu bobl fyddai wedi bod ynddo, heb amheuaeth, pe baech chi wedi clywed amdanyn nhw’n gynt. Dyna a ddigwyddodd yn ddiweddar ar ôl imi ddarganfod gwaith gan y llenor o Iwerddon, Seosamh Mac Grianna, […]
An anatomy of early Welsh tourism
How many tourists visiting Wales today, I wonder, ever think about their early predecessors? I mean those who first arrived, in surprisingly large numbers, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. How many are aware that these travellers, rather than composing Instagram posts, blogs and TikTok videos, would most likely have busied themselves drawing […]
Is there a history of walking?
It’s a question that wouldn’t have been asked, let alone answered, before Rebecca Solnit’s pioneering book Wanderlust, published in 2000. Solnit is a writer probably best known for her books on women – she was the first to formulate the idea of ‘mansplaining’ – but her range of reference is startlingly wide, and her work […]
Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Cairn’
The old Athenian playwrights were expected to follow their three tragedies for the festival of Dionysus with a lighter ‘satyr’ play. The idea, it seems, was to take the edge off the horrors and traumas of the earlier dramas. Kathleen Jamie, after publishing a trilogy of collections of lengthy essays on the large themes that […]
Tro ar fyd: ‘Trothwy’, gan Iwan Rhys
Un o’r llyfrau ar restr fer Llyfr y Flwyddyn eleni yw cyfrol fach anarferol gan Iwan Rhys, sy’n dwyn y teitl Trothwy. Wn i ddim a fydd ganddo obaith o gipio’r brif wobr. Os yw’r beirniaid yn chwilio am gyffro ac antur, efallai ddim. Ond yn ei ffordd dawel, gywrain mae Trothwy yn gadael argraff […]
Glyndŵr’s Way, day 10: Pont Llogel to Meifod
Eleri delivers us by car back from Meifod to Pont Llogel, for us to make the journey in the other direction, much more slowly, and by a different route. There’s a change in the weather today: it’s cooler, rain’s spotting in the strong breeze, and we spend a lot of time through the day pulling […]
In praise of Paul Oliver
The name Paul Oliver probably won’t ring a bell for you, unless you’re a vernacular architectural historian or a blues enthusiast. But if you belong to either camp or (unlikely, but possible) both, then you’ll almost certainly feel a debt to him. Born in Nottingham in 1927 and brought up in London, he was many […]
Swansea’s golden age of innovation
After five years of labour our baby was born last week. It weighed in at a whopping 1.88 kilograms and almost 600 pages. Its many parents are rightly proud of it. You’ll have guessed by now that it’s a big book. Entitled Swansea’s Royal Institution and Wales’s first museum, it will stand for many years […]
Yn y Gororau
Nid yw’n bosib i Mike Parker ysgrifennu llyfr sych a difywyd, a dyw ei lyfr diweddaraf ar y ffin rhwng Cymru a Lloegr, All the wide borders, ddim yn eithriad. Mae i’r gyfrol strwythur diddorol. Tair rhan sydd ynddi, sy’n gyfatebol i’r tri phrif afon yn ardaloedd y ffin, Afon Dyfrdwy, Afon Hafren ac Afon […]