Category: history
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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,…
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From empire to environment: inside the Brangwyn Hall
It was a Monday morning a few weeks ago and I was taking some photos of the outside of the Brangwyn Hall. A motor caravan had parked in the bay in front. A man leaned out of its window and kindly promised to move out of the way and let me perfect my Leni Riefenstahl…
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Unreal City
The City of London, the ‘square mile’, must count as one of the strangest places on earth. During the week thousands of workers stream into it every morning over London Bridge – ‘… so many, I had not thought death had undone so many’, says the Dantean voice of The Waste Land – to apply…
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Cymry’r Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf
Ydych chi’n chwilio am lyfr dibynadwy a darllenadwy yn Gymraeg sy’n dangos hanes y Rhyfel Mawr mewn geiriau a lluniau, o safbwynt pobl Cymru? Os felly, does dim angen arnoch chwilio ymhellach na Cymry’r Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf gan Gwyn Jenkins, cyfrol odidog a gyhoeddwyd yr wythnos ddiwethaf gan Y Lolfa. Dyma lyfr hardd (ie, hardd,…
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National Theatre Wales’s ‘Mametz’: a review
As part of Wales’s commemoration of the First World War, and almost exactly two years ahead of the centenary of the battle, National Theatre Wales has ‘staged’ a version of the fierce struggle for possession of Mametz Wood. This battle was fought over six days in July 1916 between largely Welsh volunteer soldiers and highly…
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In search of a younger self: John Clare and me
Thursday afternoon I’m in a café in Market Deeping, just north of Stamford, Lincolnshire. I buy a coffee and then pull out from my wallet two miniature black and white photographs from the early 1950s. They show a house that still stands, I think, somewhere in the village. One shows part of the frontage, the…
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Caratacus, Caradog, Caractacus
If Calgacus might be thought of as the earliest known anti-imperialist Scotland has produced, Wales has some claim on an earlier native leader of resistance to the Roman occupation of Britain, Caratacus. He’s a figure well worth excavating, as an historical character and as a focus of myth-making in the centuries since his time. 1 …
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Barbarians and idiots
It’s Saturday evening, and the three of us are sitting round the kitchen table after a meal, with the remains of a bottle of cheap but perfectly good red wine from Bulgaria. Its label says, ‘from the Thracian lowlands’. A. recalls that he went to Bulgaria on holiday, many years ago, in communist times. All…
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‘Sweet sister death has gone debauched today’: artists and writers in Mametz Wood
Mametz Wood: three syllables that have lost none of their power to appal, after almost a hundred years. On 7 July 1916 the infantrymen of the 38th or Welsh Division, most of them volunteers and amateur soldiers, were ordered to make a frontal assault on a German-held line in front of a wood, roughly a…