Category: books
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Generosity of a bookseller
In Swansea institutions don’t get more crustily venerable than the Royal Institution of South Wales. But people too can grow into institutions. Jeff Towns, the first speaker in the RISW’s new season of talks, can’t deny that he too is a Swansea fixture. True, he doesn’t go as far back as 1835, but since he…
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Wales and whales
Last week several very unusual sightings of long-finned pilot whales were recorded off the coast of Wales. Pilot whales rarely leave the deep sea, but cetologists think that these examples were following food – they eat squid and small fish – that have also wandered on to the continental shelf. Today whales and other sea mammals…
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Wales Coast Path, day 64: Abersoch from Llanengan
M has arrived from Yorkshire to join the three of us for today’s almost-circular clifftop walk. We start with the same introduction as yesterday, train to Pwllheli (same affable guard), and the Berwyn bus towards Abersoch (same wild career along single track roads). But this time we get off early, in the small village of…
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‘Me, myself and I’ (slight reprise)
Since writing about Billie Holiday’s song Me, myself and I, the question of ‘who is I?’ has been gnawing away inside my mind. A couple of weeks ago I picked up a second-hand book in Thirsk that’s turned the gnawing into a gnashing. The book is called Into the silent land, and it’s by a…
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‘A kestrel for a knave’: in memoriam Barry Hines
In March the news came that Barry Hines had died. My mind flashed back to the time when I went with my mother to a cinema in Barnsley to see Kes, Ken Loach’s second feature film that was based on Hines’s short novel, A kestrel for a knave, published in 1968. It was late 1969…
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Geiriaduron a Karl Marx
Digwydd bod yn swyddfeydd Gwasg Gomer yn Llandysul rai wythnosau yn ôl, a dod o hyd i hen gyfaill, D. Geraint Lewis. Roedd camerâu Heno yn yr adeilad, i ddathlu cyhoeddi llyfr mawr, a doedd dim cyfle cael sgwrs. Achos y dathlu oedd y llyfr mwyaf a gyhoeddwyd yn hanes y cwmni, sef llyfr gan…
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The Eagle flies again
On our coastal walks C and I have discussed most things under the sun. One of them, on a Gower trip in early September, was the Eagle comic, which we both read as young lads. Now C has lent me his battered and beloved copy of the Eagle Annual Number One to read over Christmas…
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August Kleinzahler v Google: knowledge in excess
For my money the liveliest American poet at the present is August Kleinzahler. I first came across him in his collection Sleeping it off in Rapid City (2008), a title that says a lot about his themes and his expression. He’s quite well known on this side of the Atlantic – Faber now publishes him,…
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Iain Sinclair goes home
Urban is his element, and London his patch. But now, in his early seventies, Iain Sinclair has come home to his native Wales for his latest book, Black apples of Gower. For someone who’s followed the path of his wanderings and writings for years – I joined the trip late, with White Chappell, scarlet tracings…
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Ar y Mynydd Du
Golygfa ddu yw hi, o bob cyfeiriad, does dim dwywaith. O’r A48, er engraifft, wrth ichi yrru o Gaerfyrddin tua Cross Hands, mae’n anodd osgoi edrych draw, am eiliad o leiaf, i’r wal dywyll, fygythiol o fryniau sy’n ymestyn ar y gorwel yn y dwyrain – ymyl gorllewinol y Mynydd Du. ‘Du’ mewn ffordd arall…