gwallter

  • In 1892 Edgar Degas was around 58 years old.  Not old, certainly by our standards, and he had twenty years and more left to live.  But the landscapes he painted in the 1890s tend to get called ‘late paintings’, with…

  • Lea Ypi’s Free: coming of age at the end of history, published in 2021, is a very unusual book.  It’s at once a rite-of-passage memoir – Lea is around eight or nine years old at the start and is about…

  • The 2021 Richard Burton Lecture in Swansea University was given this week by David Anderson, Director General of Amgueddfa Cymru (‘Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales’, to give it its hyper-awkward formal name).  His title was ‘Do Welsh museums matter?’ …

  • Last week I was felled by a mysterious (non-Covid) illness.  The doctor’s best guess was that it was caused by ‘Virus X’, a hard-to-pin-down invader that was powerful enough to wreak temporary havoc with my body.  (My father-in-law, who was…

  • Mae’n ddigon hysbys mai mudiad dosbarth canol, ar y cyfan, oedd y mudiad i ennill y bleidlais i ferched yn y DU yn ystod y blynyddoedd cyn y Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf.  Cryfder oedd hyn i’r graddau fod gan yr ymgyrchwyr…

  • Estyn has published a review of teaching Welsh history in schools, including specifically the teaching of BAME history.  It makes gloomy reading for anyone who believes that understanding where we are now in Wales, and where we might be in…

  • I’ve been reading, for the first time, A pilgrim’s progress.  I suspect that’s a rare event these days, at least in this country.  It’s easy to forget that John Bunyan’s book was for several centuries the most widely-read book in…

  • Among the eleven ‘Welsh sonnets’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins are counted some of the outstanding poems written in English in the nineteenth century.  They include ‘God’s grandeur’, ‘Pied beauty’ and ‘The windhover’. Hopkins came to live in St Beuno’s College…

  • This week the Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (RhLC from now on) wrote an article sparked by the campaign by Vaughan Gething, the minister for the Welsh economy, to persuade young people born or raised in Wales not to emigrate.…

  • Slow radio at its best achieves what no amount of ‘fast radio’, with its assumption of the attention span of a hoverfly, can achieve: thought connections that stay in the mind long after the programme has ended.  Paul Farley’s recent…

annual archive

hear about new blogs