Category: history
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The Home Rule All Round movement
To get a swift appreciation of the whole sweep of Welsh history for a current project, I’ve been re-reading John Davies’s great Hanes Cymru / A history of Wales (rev. ed. 2007). It’s a big book but the pleasure of reading it is even bigger. Especially when you pause in your reading to remember John…
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Two Svalbard flights
The most remarkable place on the planet I’ve visited, in the summer of 2005, is the Svalbard archipelago. Svalbard lies half way between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole, between 74 and 81 degrees north, far within the Arctic Circle. About 60% of its surface is covered with glacial ice, and ice…
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Down among the artistocrats
Chatsworth, when I was an innocent boy, and later when an innocent parent, meant a fun day out. A chance to gawp at the baroque luxuries, scamper on the lawns and play games in the playground. At the time we absorbed the whole place on its own terms. One of the reasons was that Chatsworth…
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Goya and the Philippines junta: power mocked
The town of Castres has several claims to fame. At its centre handsome rows of old tanners’ and weavers’ houses overhang the river Agout. It was where the socialist leader and peacemaker Jean Jaurès was born in 1859. It has a flourishing ‘Top 14’ rugby side. And it contains the Goya Museum, which specialises in…
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A west African honeymoon, 1913
Our honeymoon (1980) was spent on two bicycles in north Norfolk. Laughable by today’s standards, but also, maybe, by those of a hundred years ago. My brother recently gave me a copy of a family document I’d never seen before. It’s a four page leaflet, printed in 1938 ‘on the occasion of her Silver Wedding’,…
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Jimi Hendrix and Ludwig Wittgenstein in Swansea
That Jimi Hendrix came to Swansea was news to me until yesterday. It seemed almost as unlikely as the fact that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to stay here on his holidays. Gary Gregor, in his excellent South Wales Evening Post column ‘Hidden History’, says in his latest contribution that Hendrix visited the city in the 1960s.…
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The religion of inequality
The other day, for no apparent reason, I pulled off the shelf my old second-hand copy of R.H. Tawney’s book Equality. It still has a ragged and discoloured dust jacket, with a tea stain on the front, and it was well used before I bought it, for £1, on a date, unusually, I failed to…
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A brief history of austerity
John Naughton observed the other day that neoliberal economists and their current weapon, austerity, have gained an unassailable intellectual hegemony. To claim that austerity is self-defeating and should be stopped is to be regarded as either foolish or mad. Ed Miliband, leader of a political party that was established – absurd idea! – to represent…
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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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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.…