history
Erlid ac alltud: Heini Gruffudd a W.G. Sebald
Does fawr o wirionedd yn yr honiad na all llyfrau Cymraeg ddod i afael â digwyddiadau mawr y byd. Ond os ydych chi’n dod i hyd i rywun sy’n ceisio ei honni, yr ateb syml yw ‘Darllenwch Yr erlid gan Heini Gruffudd’. Erchyllterau gwaethaf yr ugeinfed ganrif – dinistr yr Iddewon gan y Natsïaid – […]
Weddings, town halls and local democracy
Last weekend our daughter Catrin got married, in Islington Town Hall. It was a fine choice for a wedding. The Town Hall is a large neoclassical building facing the main street, opened in the mid-1920s. The exterior is plain and conventional enough, though its unusually large, long windows suggest an open and welcoming attitude. It’s […]
The overcoat
I was sitting reading in the front room yesterday when a sharp rap on the window made me jump. A man stood at the door. Only the sharp features of his face were visible; the rest of his body was protected from the cold wind and rain by a thick shell of industrial yellow. Behind […]
Wales Coast Path, day 8: Rhoose from St Donats
I’m back with C and J in the King George V Field, St Donats. The morning’s not as bright as the weather forecast promised, but there’s no wind, and it’s not cold. So off we march down the field to join the coast path, and turn east for Rhoose. We’re high above crumbly sandstone cliffs, […]
Alfred Russel Wallace, Cymru a radicaliaeth
Gan mlynedd ar ôl ei farwolaeth mae’r naturiaethwr o Gymru Alfred Russel Wallace o’r diwedd yn derbyn cydnabyddiaeth yn ein hamser ni am ei orchestion – nid yn unig am fod yn gyd-ddyfeisiwr, gyda Charles Darwin, o’r theori ‘esblygiad trwy ddetholiad naturiol’, ond hefyd am ei waith ar fioddaearyddiaeth a sawl pwnc arall. Dadorchuddiodd David […]
Emily Dickinson’s reticent volcano
It’s taken a long time for Emily Dickinson to come out. During her lifetime (1830-86) only ten of her roughly 1,800 extant poems were published, some of them without her knowledge. After her death her manuscripts lay disregarded by all but a few. It was not till 1955 that anything close to a complete edition […]
What Calgacus said
Andrew Marr recently made the point that the future of Scotland is a subject almost totally ignored in the rest of the UK. ‘Nobody is talking about what kind of a Scotland we want after independence’, he said, ‘people in England haven’t really come to terms with what it would mean.’ It would be fair […]
London: scene of flight, scene of destruction
Fleeing from the noise and heat of the midday traffic we took our sandwiches to a bench in a small public garden off Marylebone High Street. What we’d chanced upon was the site of the old St Marylebone church, across the road from its 1817 replacement. Nothing remains of the first three churches (the current […]