literature
In Bunhill Fields
This week we paid a visit to a place that’s been on my wish list for many years: Bunhill Fields. Some might think it a perverse pilgrimage, because Bunhill Fields isn’t not a rural glade or open park, but an old burial ground – the origin of ‘Bunhill’ is thought to be ‘bone hill’ – […]
Mr Deas
Another birthday, and I’m celebrating by throwing out yet more paper hoarded over the years. This time it includes a dark red ring-file containing notes and essays from my first-year university course in Classics. They’re written in handwriting it’s still quite easy to make out. (By contrast, my handwriting today, disabled by decades of keyboard […]
Helen Dunmore’s Catullus
When Helen Dunmore died at the age of 64 in June 2017 her readers mourned the loss of one of most sensitive and versatile writers of recent years. Many of them will have known her for the novels, short stories and books for children. The first work of hers I read was the first novel, […]
Orwell’s toads
On 12 April 1946 the magazine Tribune published a short piece by George Orwell entitled Some thoughts on the common toad. It’s not perhaps his most original essay – its central theme is the coming of spring, and how ubiquitous it is, even in the centre of a large city like London – but it […]
Philip Pullman and the revival of fascism
One of the sweetest memories of reading books to our daughters when they were young was narrating Philip Pullman’s ‘His dark materials trilogy’ to E. in the 1990s, not long after the books were published. One of them, Northern lights, carries a message to E. from the author on its title page. Sometimes I’d continue […]
Brasil: dwy long, dau fardd
Un o’r cyfnodau allweddol ym mywyd a barddoniaeth T.H. Parry-Williams oedd ei fordaith, ar ei ben i hun, i dde America yn 1925. Ar y pryd bu cryn ansicrwydd, nid y lleiaf ar ran y bardd ei hun, am y rheswm pam penderfynodd adael Cymru a’i deulu yn Rhyd-ddu – roedd ei dad mewn anhwylder […]
‘Fabula’: Llŷr Gwyn Lewis a Borges
Nôl ym mis Gorffennaf, yn siop lyfrau Palas Print yng Nghaernarfon, fe brynais i gasgliad newydd Llŷr Gwyn Lewis, Fabula. Dim ond ddoe y dechreuais ei ddarllen. Fel darllenydd confensiynol, penderfynais i gychwyn gyda’r darn cyntaf yn y gyfrol, ‘Hydref yw’r gwanwyn’. Mae iddo is-deitl, ffug-academaidd, ‘fabula, historia ac argumentum yn yr Ariannin’, sy’n eich […]
Reading and silence
I’m working my way, slowly – that seems the best way – through Sara Maitland’s A book of silence, and I’ve reached the part where she discusses the paradoxical relationship between reading and silence. On the one hand, reading the way we do it today is a silent communion between writer and reader. Silent, on […]
‘The Llanboidy molecatcher’ gan James Lewis Walters
Sylwais i ar y llun am y tro cyntaf llynedd. Ar y pryd roeddwn i’n chwilio am bethau eraill yn Amgueddfa Sir Gâr, yn hen Balas yr Esgob yn Abergwili. Hongiai’r llun yn swil, mewn lle anamlwg y tu ôl i ddrws. Ei destun eithriadol ac arddull medrus a ddenodd fy llygad gyntaf. Arhosodd y llun […]
Henry Holiday’s Boojum
Martin Gardner, in his annotated edition of Lewis Carroll’s comic poem The hunting of the Snark, includes all of the wood engraved illustrations made by Henry Holiday for the first edition in 1876. He also reproduces a drawing Holiday made for the book, but which never appeared – a picture of the Boojum, which makes […]