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The sandsone ridge of Cefn Bryn is an obvious magnet for painters, but it doesn’t seem to have drawn many creative writers, despite its brooding presence along the backbone of the Gower peninsula. One exception is Amy Dillwyn, the pioneering…
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Be welwch chi o gopa Cader?
Llynedd, am y tro cyntaf ers blynyddoedd, methais i ddringo i gopa Cadair Idris. Sa i’n gwbod pam. Covid a’i ofidiau, siŵr o fod, neu absenoldeb meddwl, neu ohirio oherwydd pwysau eraill. Ond, o edrych yn ôl, dwi’n teimlo rhyw…
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Can the British Museum change?
The recent return to Nigeria of some of the Benin bronzes from collections across Europe has heightened the debate about ‘repatriating’ museum objects to the places from which they were illegally seized. The finely made bronze plaques and sculptures once…
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Tair cerdd gan Guillaume Apollinaire
Pont Mirabeau O dan bont Mirabeau rhed afon SeineAc ein serchauOes rhaid imi ddwyn i’m cofLlawenydd wastad yn dilyn y dolur Dechrau nosi taro’r cloc Treigla’r dyddiau sefyll wna i Law yn llaw arhoswn wyneb yn wynebTra dan y bontEin…
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Sir Boris Walpole and the cartoonists
It’s a commonplace that since George Osborne set in motion the immiseration of poor people, through his programme of austerity and big cuts in benefits, Britain has seemed to regress to the time of our Victorian ancestors. ‘Poor laws’, and…
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William Blake, map-maker
You can’t wander far in south and mid-Wales in the early years of the nineteenth century without coming across the name of Benjamin Heath Malkin. The second edition of his book The scenery, antiquities and biography of south Wales, published…
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Beyond shame and guilt
When I was a young student and easily impressed by big theory, I was struck by a book by E.R. Dodds called The Greeks and the irrational. Its origin was a series of lectures Dodd gave in California in 1949. …
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Cymraeg ar y mynydd
Enillydd cyntaf Gwobr Ysgrif O’r Pedwar Gwynt yw Rebecca Thomas, cymrawd ôl-ddoethurol yr Academi Brydeinig ym Mhrifysgol Bangor. Ei maes academaidd yw hanes Cymru yn yr oesoedd canol cynnar, a chawn beth o’i gwybodaeth drwyadl o’r pwnc yn ei hysgrif…
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Some books I read in 2021
2021 was another big reading year, thanks to continuing Covid. Some books, especially fiction, arrived thanks to our resuscitated book club – almost all were titles I’d not have thought of taking off the shelf myself, so they were doubly…
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Melesina Bowen’s ‘Ystradffin’
In recent years many Welsh women poets of the past have been rescued from the condescension of posterity, not least in the anthology edited by Katie Gramich and Catherine Brennan. But one of them has so far escaped much attention. …